Chained to the Magma Pit
by dosbunie
Summary: As a child, Naruto dealt with anger the best way he could; via revenge, screaming into pillows, and picking fights he couldn't win. Meeting the Nine Tailed fox introduces a new option for fun therapy. AKA the fic where Naruto meets Kurama early and they can communicate. They just have nothing nice to say to each other. AU. Character focused, slow burn.
1. Chapter 1

Naruto stomped into his rundown apartment long past dusk. The street lanterns were lit below, and the crowds were delighting in the balmy spring weather. He didn't care. He didn't care at all. He threw himself on his bed and shuddered through deep breaths. He didn't care about the festivities or how unwelcome he was, because he didn't care. He fell face first into his bed and muffled his scream of frustration into a stained pillow.

When he finally stopped shaking, Naruto swallowed down the raw feeling in his throat and rubbed furiously at his eyes. His stomach rumbled with hunger, but instead of getting up to fix food, he rolled over and stared up at the ceiling. Instead, he pushed down the hurt sinking in his chest, and he willed himself into a quiet point of anger. His skin tingled, and then heated. The sound of the festivities outside, so far away and still so loud, faded away into the hum of water running through pipes. A drip of warm water struck his cheek.

Naruto opened his eyes. Water sloshed around his knees, muddy and clouded. He looked to the battered bars of the towering cage.

Kyubi stared back down at him, bored and disdainful. He rests his chin atop a soaking paw. "You failed your test, loser."

Naruto clenched his fist. His expression only twitched. Then he raised his palm out in front of him. He swiped it downward, and chains materialized, falling and striking into the water. The instant net caught Kyubi around the throat. It dragged the beast under the suddenly bottomless water.

Naruto waited until he felt a little better. Then he allowed Kyubi to gently float to the surface. He allowed the fox to breathe, to splutter curses.

"My day went great," Naruto said with a happy smile. "Thanks so much. I finally achieved my dreams. I owe you." Naruto tilted his head down, and the chains tightened around the kyubi's throat and muzzle, making the demon yowl in pain. The boy's sunny expression darkened, and his voice softened. "You hate me that much? You couldn't let me have a single thing go right?"

The kyubi yowled curses, and Naruto screamed right back. It was a normal Thursday, and the boy had failed his graduation exam for the first time.

* * *

It all began when Naruto was seven, and he got so angry he blacked out. He came face to face with a strange world, full of shadows and buzzing halogen, with hot metal pipes and foul water. It dissolved a moment later, and he was right back in his class at the academy, facing off against his latest unfair teacher. But now his teacher's face was pale. He sent Naruto back to his desk without any further scolding.

And before the pipes, that weird dream that felt so vivid, Naruto had been full of fury. He'd been indignant, ready to scream and yell that it wasn't his fault. He got blamed for things that weren't his fault, because it was easy to blame him.

But afterwards, he just felt confused. And shaken. His sandals weren't wet, but they should have been. That's how real it felt. He thought it might have been a genjutsu, but why would someone cast it? Thinking about it just made him frustrated, so he ignored the memory of his teacher's shaken expression and his classmates' detached confusion.

Instead, when he was alone, he tried to see that world again. Hot, muggy, and stagnant. Even remembering it made his spine prickle like bugs were crawling over his skin. It felt like his nightmares crawled out from underneath his bed and decided to tag along where they weren't wanted.

After a few days of trying, Naruto gave up. He forgot about it and moved on.

* * *

"Naruto," the third Hokage sighed. He looked up from his desk and pinned the boy with a disappointed look. "What is it this time?"

Naruto glowered at the floor and shrugged. "I didn't do anything."

The chunin restraining Naruto with an ample amount ninja wire rolled his eyes. "He released several hundred crickets into a teriyaki restaurant and spiked the manager's uniform with pheromones."

"Where would I even get cricket pheromones?" Naruto challenged sarcastically. "It sounds like they just had a health code violation or a faulty container at the pet shop." He shrugged his shoulders and twisted around, his fidgeting finally overriding his desire to look vaguely dignified. "I got an itch on my nose," he complained, stamping his feet as much as he could.

"Then why did the restaurant owner insist it would be you?" The chunin huffed, but he reached over to scratch Naruto's nose. "And why did you resist being brought in?

Naruto returned the favor by sneezing on it. "Ahh, thanks!" Naruto ignored both his second question and his thinly veiled look of disgust and yelled, "And that's because I went to his shitty stand and complained about there being a bug in my food! Which there was! So he's got a history of health code violations, and now he's trying to blame me."

"So if I were to check with local bug enthusiasts, none of them would tell me you bought anything of that nature?" The Hokage said.

"No!" Naruto huffed and looked past him. "Like anyone would sell me it. Hah, no, he's got no proof, dattebayo!"

The Hokage glanced over to the chunin. "Thank you for your work. Dismissed."

With a short nod of respect, the chunin released his hold on the ninja wire and retracted it into the mechanical reels hidden in his sleeves.

Naruto stuck his tongue out at him as he exited the office, rubbing at his wrists. He nearly bolted out after him, but that would just get him a longer lecture. The boy glanced back to the Hokage. "They got nothing on me, old man."

"Your reputation precedes you," Sarutobi said dryly. "Clever to use it to your advantage, I suppose."

Naruto's eyes widened at the praise, and he broke into a grin before he realized the implications. His surliness melted away, replaced with an excitement. "I used a henge today, too! It had everyone fooled-until I tripped, y'know?"

Sarutobi shook his head, cutting off Naruto's unwarranted good mood. "You aren't off the hook, Naruto. You forgot to wash your hands."

Naruto looked down, only to see a single cricket happily perched on his sleeve. He blanched and shook his arm furiously, but the thing kept buzzing back to his sleeve until he smacked it. "Ahh, get off!"

Sarutobi eyed the display with a degree of humor, but he quickly sobered. "You are going to clean up your mess. And pay a fine to the establishment-"

"That's not fair!" Naruto shouted, distracted from his disgust with the bug guts on his hand. "That bastard had it coming!"

"-And for stealing both the crickets and the pheromones," Sarutobi continued.

Naruto gritted his jaw, before he decided to own up to his skills. "I didn't steal any crickets," he corrected imperiously. "I got them myself. Store bought ones don't swarm right."

"I'm not going to praise your ingenuity." The Hokage pinned him with a look. "If you want to be a respected ninja, Naruto, you can't pick a fight with everyone who looks at you wrong."

Naruto bared his teeth. He's not the one picking fights. Everyone has a problem with him, not the other way around. "I don't! Because then I would have to prank everyone!" His landlord, his teachers, people on the street. They all treated him like he was shit on their shoe, and he was sick of it!

"When you have difficulties, you need to file a report or submit a complaint," the Hokage continued. "And I will take care of it."

"Well, what's gonna happen to the owner, huh?"

"Nothing," Sarutobi stated. "Because you're almost nine, and this is the fourth time I've had to tell you to stop in the last month, and you're somehow under the impression that you can lie to my face. So nothing will happen."

Naruto threw his hands up, his scarred cheeks flushing red in anger. "That's not fair!" Naruto got a bug in his food, no refund, and an asshole treating him like dirt. He shouldn't have to do shit to help him.

"I think you will find it is," Sarutobi said, his tone uncompromising. "And if it isn't, I don't really care."

Naruto stood rooted to the spot, betrayal making his hands shake. He clenched them into fists and ignored the stinging in his eyes. "Fine," he bit out. "I'll clean up his shitty shop."

"Then you're dismissed. I'm taking the fine out of your stipend."

And there went the new kunai set he had been eyeing for weeks. Whatever. It's not like it would fix his horrible aim. Naruto turned stiffly and marched out of the office. He stomped all the way back to the other side of Kohona and glared the shitty shop owner in the eye. He had a cricket on his hat and a glower on his face, and Naruto didn't mention either of them.

He spent the next few hours painstakingly collecting the dumb bugs and ignoring the obvious rage of the teriyaki stand owner. His mood progressively got worse as he wasted his day off. He should have washed his hands better. Or changed clothes.

Why am I so dumb? He went through all the trouble of not getting seen, and the old man clocked him in half a second. He would just have to be sneakier next time.

"Damn it!" Naruto cursed as another cricket escaped from his clutches. He scrabbled forward on his knees, chasing the slippery bug as it fled under a table. "Get back here!"

"Funnily enough," Iruka-sensei said stiffly, "That's exactly what I said to you earlier today."

Naruto's head whipped up. He yelped when it collided with underside of the table. "Ow! Hey, don't sneak up on me like that, datebayo!" He had heard someone, but he'd assumed it was one of the few customers who had braved the shop's partial re-opening.

Iruka glowered at him, not dignifying that with a response. "Quit making ninja chase you. It's getting old."

So he was grouchy about being outsmarted, huh? "Sounds like y'all are the ones getting old," Naruto scoffed, not in the mood for a second lecture. "Not my fault you can't see through a basic transformation." And Iruka had been the one to critique his transformation just last week. Naruto felt deeply satisfied with the work he had put into his prank; his tireless efforts with the transformation jutsu had been mostly for Iruka.

"You have a cricket on your shoulder," Iruka said, the vein in his forehead pulsing despite his calm tone.

"That's Maki. He's my second in command." The little hellion had a half a wing to his name, and he still managed to escape every time Naruto so much as cracked the box open. He had quickly grown fond of the chirping bug.

Iruka snorted a laugh. "Comradery between pests?"

Naruto flinched, and suddenly decided he hated his teacher. Mizuki was now batting for the position of favorite. Iruka had dropped to the bottom of the list. "Yeah," he drawled, loud and grating like he knew Iruka hated. "My dearest and only friend!" Naruto turned around and went back to chasing after the stray cricket.

Iruka sighed and dropped into a crouch. "Listen, Naruto, I'm not here to yell at you."

"Really? You got something better to do?" Naruto jerked back and shoved the cricket into the container. He then stood and pointedly ignored his instructor as he listened for the next one.

"I'm sorry I called you a pest," Iruka tried, rubbing at his forehead. "I didn't mean it like that."

"Yeah, yeah," Naruto said bluntly, "sure you didn't. I don't have time. I'm very busy."

"Here, let me help-"

"I don't need your stupid help!" Naruto glared at Iruka, and his dumb look of frustration, and his constant wariness that he never gave to any other student. Iruka might try to pretend otherwise, but Naruto wasn't stupid. No matter what other people thought, he wasn't stupid. "You're too loud and I can't hear them, so just leave me alone!"

Iruka stared at him, his expression carefully poised. "Alright. We have a quiz tomorrow. Don't forget." He stood and brushed a stray bug off his flack jacket. "Good luck."

Naruto glowered at his retreating back. He nearly kicked his box of crickets because they were so loud he could barely hear himself think. "I'm not a pest," he muttered as he chased down the last remnants of his prank. "I'm not."

He finished gathering nearly all the bugs, and he figured it would just have to be good enough. The owner saw him off with a scowl, and Naruto flipped him off before he set off for a training ground where he could release his crickets. At some point, Maki crawled into his hair and started singing next to his ear. Naruto shuddered, but he let the bug have free reign. At least someone was happy to be around him.

The setting sun turned training ground eight into a golden zone. The sky above turned pink and orange, and Naruto whished he could enjoy it. Instead, he trekked deeper into the underbrush. Bushes caught at his pants, but he pushed further into the clearing where he first collected the crickets.

"Thank you all for your hard work," he told the bugs as he set the box down. "Despite all odds, your mission was a success. The failure lies with me." Somberly, he gave his subordinates a salute, opened the box, and quickly fled before any more bugs could jump on him.

He began the long trek back to his apartment, walking slowly through the streets with his hands shoved in his pockets. His stomach rumbled, and but the sour taste of anger prevented ruined his appetite. He shouldered his way into his apartment and flung his jacket in the corner. Cups, all in wildly carious states of cleanliness, covered his countertops, but Naruto ignored the mess and sunk into his couch with a tired sigh.

Then his hair started chirping.

Naruto looked around for a split minute before he began laughing. He put Maki on his bedside table, showered, and went to sleep. The singing drowned out the noises of the street below.

* * *

He failed his quiz.

That was normal. Naruto wasn't worth shit in academics. But the look in Iruka's eye when he handed back the exams, all pitiful and annoyed, made Naruto want to chew glass.

He picked a fight with Kiba during taijutsu practice that day just so he could calm down. Kiba seemed to recognize it as a bloodmatch, because he kept making loud, cocky quips that only infuriated Naruto more. He got sloppy out of sheer anger, Kiba kicked his ass for it.

Iruka spotted the beginnings of a nasty black eye when their class returned for end-of-day lecture, but he didn't comment. Naruto tried his best to pay attention, but every word out of his instructor's mouth felt incomprehensible. His mood didn't improve.

Instead of going to the park or trying to tag along with some group from his class, Naruto walked over to the east side of Kohona. The teriyaki stand he pranked earlier that week was back in business. There were still a few bugs lingering on the edges on the premises, their chirping loud and clear.

Naruto snorted and then entered the adjacent pet store. He marched up to the front counter, and the clerk's eyes narrowed in recognition. Naruto scowled at her in return. "I have a pet cricket. What do I feed it?"

"We don't sell cricket food," The clerk said. "Crickets are the food."

Naruto argued with the clerk for a good ten minutes on the topic before he felt satisfied and ready to leave. He didn't buy anything, which meant he would probably get kicked out the next time he tried to come in, but it was worth it. Some stores told him to scram immediately, and Naruto usually fought against that viciously enough that it wasn't a battle worth picking. He had earned his reputation of being a hellion fairly, and he was going to prove it to everyone, one shop at a time.

He went home, ignoring the mess building up on his counters. Crickets were scavengers, so they really ate whatever Naruto had. He appreciated it. He had someone he could share meals with. He ran to his room and grabbed the small container he had made for Maki out of a clean takeout cup and a pane of broken window glass.

Naruto carefully set the lid aside and greeted his pet with a soft, "Hey. Wake up."

Instead of leaping from the box, the bug didn't move. Not even when Naruto uncorked the bottle of leftover pheromones. They should still be good-Naruto had traded a lot a favors and money to get another orphan to agree to buy him some. It should have lasted for another day or two before losing potency.

Naruto stared into the box, and he leaned against the wall, giving it a little shake. Slowly, he slid down to a crouch, the drywall cool against his back, and poked the bug with his pinky finger. Maki didn't stir, even though that morning, he had been chirping just fine.

Throat tight, Naruto rose and tossed the takeout container in the trash. It figured. Maki didn't have wings. He was probably going to die all along, and Naruto was just too dumb to realize it.

Naruto finally cleared off his countertops, dully washing all the dishes he had neglected for the week. Mold had grown on a few of the dirtier plates, and an old cup of milk made him gag in disgust. He took his momentum and ran with it, soaking that bathroom in bleach and sweeping out everycorner of his home. He threw the old food from his fridge in the trash, not caring whether he would be able to afford more.

When his hunger finally broke through his single-minded focus, it was dark. His alarm clock batteries had finally died. The couple down the hall was arguing about whether to have a child. They couldn't decide who would quit their careers to be the main parent. They wanted their child to have stability. They wanted little Mitsuki to grow up in a nice neighborhood. They didn't want to raise a child in such a dangerous building.

Little Mitsuki, if ever born, would have good parents.

Naruto sighed and set some water to boil. Then, like some switch had been flipped, all the aches from scrubbing at the floors and his awful taijutsu match surfaced. Exhausted, Naruto flooped over the arm of his couch and laid there, awkwardly sprawled and staring at the ceiling.

Unbidden, his eyes started stinging, and Naruto let his tears run back into his hair.

Which one of his parents had wanted to raise him? Had they both rushed into the kyubi attack? Had they both been civilian? Had he been wanted at all? Did his mother know what she had done by giving him such a horrible birthday?

The argument got louder. The water in his kettle hissed, but didn't scream.

Would they have let him keep a stupid cricket as a pet? Would they have kept it alive?

Naruto slammed his head into the cushions, and it did nothing to alleviate the pain in his chest. He twisted and buried his head under a pillow that smelt of sweat. He could still hear his stupid, rude neighbors and he hated it. He hated that stupid shop owners had a family to go home to, and that he never did. No one ever adopted him. No one ever would.

It wasn't fair, and the whole world, just like the old hokage, didn't really care.

Naruto screamed into his pillow and punched at his shitty couch, anger rearing up hotter than magma. It burned a painful hole in his throat and it never abated. It just built and built until Naruto's skin heated up and tingled.

And then, between one scream and the next, his pillow disappeared, and Naruto snapped to awareness. He stood in the middle of a hallway, grubby water flowing over his bare feet. Hot steam hissed from the numerous pipes running along the walls. The light burned and buzzed like red-gold.

He turned, slowly. There was a door. The handle was a wheel, metal and rusted. It opened easily, and Naruto stepped inside. The door opened into a giant cavern, industrial and stinking of stagnant water.

Naruto stepped through, almost in a trance. He walked towards a feeling so similar to the burn of fury in his throat-and up to a row a giant columns. All neat and orderly in a line.

Except, as he looked higher, he realized the structure looming above him was not a platform, but a lock. The columns were bars. And the structure in front of him was a cage. He stared up at the paper pasted against the metal, trying to understand the script in the dark.

As his vision adjusted, he realized he wasn't alone.

A red eye stared down at him from behind the bars, dark and stark against the white of an eye taller than him.

"What the hell?" Naruto breathed, frozen in shock.

And then the beast growled. A shockwave of ripples disturbed the stagnant water, causing him to flinch.

Naruto snapped back to consciousness in his living room. His heartbeat thundered in his ears and his skin tingled. Breath shuddering, he sat bolt upright and frantically looked around his shabby little apartment. His kettle still hadn't boiled. The argument down the hall hadn't moved on from screaming.

Naruto looked down at his adrenaline-shaky hands and said quietly, "What the hell was that?"

* * *

Edited 11/20 because ff ruined my formatting. If you enjoyed, let me know!


	2. Chapter 2

Naruto could ignore a lot of things. It came with the territory: Sharp ears and a bad reputation meant he spent a fair share of his life shrugging off the sting of whispers. Not instantly, of course. He mocked his dismissive teachers, pranked the hell out of people who tried to screw him over, and acted just as rude as people were to him. But at the end of the day, if he didn't learn how to get over it, he would explode. His brain would go on the fritz and send him into a spiral that had him screaming at spilt milk for lack of anything else to do.

So he learned to shove everything off the cliffs of his head. Away went his confusion, his frustration, his grudges, and anything he couldn't understand. If he kept the with him, it would only weigh him down. It would scratch and scratch him down to the bone, and he knew better than to hold something so close.

Sometimes the more pesky hurts and tenacious mysteries would crawl right back up and reappear, like roaches emerging from a drain. His parents. His failures. The cold looks that he attracted. They showed up again and again, recurring and inescapable. He knew how to handle those as well. Naruto hugged his fears and his sadness, held them close to his chest and cradled them, and then smacked them right back down the drain and poured some emotional bleach to chase it.

But the fact remained:

He didn't know how to ignore this.

It followed him to class and ate at him during his freetime. It showed up in his nightmares. The feeling of muggy, heat sunk into his skin and caused him to break into a sweat. It made him choke on steam during his showers, so he switched to lukewarm water. It made the red light of his alarm clock a threat staring at him in the dark, so he ditched it.

If crawled up again and again, because this little roach of a feeling wasn't anger, and it wasn't sadness, and it wasn't pain. It was fear.

Naruto had never really been afraid of the dark. It had never been an option, back at the orphanage. No one cared if he was afraid, and so Naruto had to live with it. He wasn't afraid of snakes or bugs. He saw them too often in the wild. And he certainly wasn't afraid of people hating him, because he already knew with a defined certainty that they did. But he feared the orange-gold shadows inside that sewer.

And that made him mad enough to try to confront it.

* * *

Hinata Hyuga felt well at home with being a wallflower. In the compound, she was never afforded the luxury of painlessly existing in the background. People were always watching her, looking for her to slip and shrink. It made standing all the harder, when there were so many people just waiting for her to fall.

It was why she appreciated the academy, even if the material got dull.

Watching her peers never dulled. They behaved so differently than the customs mandated within the Hyuga compound. Their expressions showed all sorts of emotions and thoughts. They didn't watch her, waiting for her to slip. At the academy, she was the watcher.

She just wished she didn't have to do it from such a distance.

Theoretically, Hinata could make friends. It's just hard to do so without talking, and Hinata had never been good at it. Talking made her nervous enough to pass out. It hurt. Even when she managed, it came out weakly, creakingly.

Since everyone expected her to speak, it was easier to give people no reason to want that. So, she watched from afar and kept to herself.

"Damn it!"

Watching Naruto wasn't hard. He kept visible, in the center of attention. He had moments where he would wander off or sit quietly, but they were rare. He preferred to talk or yell or fight. During lunch, he often went around talking to people, and he obviously didn't care that they were waiting for him to fall.

Hinata admired Naruto for that. He never felt scared enough to be quiet. He never let that stop him.

But recently, Naruto hid. He retreated to out-of-sight areas and sat without doing much of anything. Sometimes he would pace, or lie down, or climb a tree and hang upside down bonelessly, but most often, he sat with an expression of pained concentration.

When Hinata focused hard enough, she could feel him manipulating chakra. It would swirl around him restlessly before suddenly contracting. It felt like someone flicking the back of her neck, right where her blind spot would be. It felt unsettling. Enough so that she usually left quickly. But today, curiosity had her hidden in the shade of a tree, watching as Naruto forced himself to sit still for stretches of time.

Suddenly, Naruto jumped to his feet, and Hinata shrunk back behind her tree. She heard him groan in frustration and pace, back and forth around the base of his chosen tree, before settling back down. "Ugh. Just stay!"

Curiosity pricking at her, Hinata activated her eyes and scanned the area behind her.

Naruto sat in a meditative pose, although his knees were not level and his posture was too stiff. Chakra flared up from his skin, racing around him in agitated bursts. Most of it dissipated in the air, but that didn't slow the flow of energy. Instead, after several long seconds, the energy condensed and spiraled inwards to the gate on his stomach. He was getting faster, she noted.

It was fascinating to see. Like a whirlpool, it cycled through and through, brutally focused. And then it shuddered, shook with a pulse of alien chakra, and the wonderous construct dissolved. Hinata's eyes relaxed, but the afterimages remained as brightspots over her vision.

"Damn it!"

Hinata swallowed the lump in her throat. Despite how amazing it looked-Naruto's chakra raised her hackles. It was ragged, furious, and barely controlled. He was trying to do some technique, that much was obvious, but the stranglehold he put on his chakra obviously wasn't working. It retaliated, almost. The anger inside the technique wasn't working.

It was similar to her eyes. He could get his chakra to move the way he needed. He just couldn't maintain it.

Suddenly, Naruto growled, "What do you want?"

Hinata stiffened. This wasn't like the mumbles Naruto used to talk to himself.

"I know you're there, so just quit it!"

Hinata dropped her head and breathed through the sudden wave of anxiety that flooded her stomach. She then gathered herself and quickly fled. She wanted to apologize for interrupting, for spying-but she didn't think it would work. She couldn't make it work.

"Hey, dattebayo!" Before Hinata could get any further, Naruto hurtled through the trees and flagged her down. "Wait, wait!"

Hinata froze. Even when Naruto caught up to her, she couldn't turn to look him in the eye.

He still faced her head on, without a glimpse of his earlier irritation. "How much time do we have left? Did I sleep through anything?"

Slowly, Hinata shook her head. Embarrassment rooted her feet to the floor, but she raised two fingers and then curled her hand into a lax fist.

"Uhhh, you mean twenty minutes?" Hinata nodded. Naruto grinned. "Wow, I thought I had way less than that. Thanks!"

Hinata wanted so badly to open her mouth. She just wanted to respond normally, for once. But her throat felt like it would crack open in she even dared. She shrunk inward and nodded.

Naruto stared at her for a moment, and his expression flashed with hurt. Then he covered it up with a bright smile. "Sorry if I yelled at you! Just got frustrated, y'know? Thought you might have been. . . I dunno, someone." Then he laughed, loud as could be. "Not that you're not someone! I was just guessing Iruka-sensei or someone else who would yell at me, and since you aren't them I figured I should, uh, just say that I'm not mad. At you."

Hinata nodded stiffly, humming a single syllable of acknowledgement. After a moment, Naruto turned back around and started back to his own spot. "Thanks, I guess."

Hinata clenched her fists until he was out of sight. Then she quietly picked her way back to the main courtyard outside the academy. She drank water until she could drown the crack in her throat.

* * *

Naruto cursed under his breath as he once again lost his grip on the world of pipes.

After so many weeks of practice, along with some mind-numbing trial and error, finding the concentration to drop into that muggy, gross headscape wasn't really the problem anymore. It was staying there for more than a few seconds which quickly proved impossible. The ground would shake, or the pipes shriek, and Naruto would flinch back to reality with a racing pulse. He usually didn't even get to stay long enough to find the cavern, the one with the cage. The one with the malevolent eye.

If he could just understand what the hell it was, he knew it wouldn't freak him out so badly. And if he could understand, he wouldn't have to go running to the old man. Naruto didn't think he was insane. He usually was certain that everyone else had a problem, and he sometimes felt like the only rational person in the world. But hallucinating, jumping at shadows, and generally hearing growls in his nightmares were not the signs of something normal.

Fueled by frustration, Naruto closed his eyes and dived right back in.

Except this time, instead of a tunnel to collapse or a dead end room, Naruto appeared in front of the cage. His breath froze, and he looked past the bars with a feeling of dread. It settled on his shoulders and steeped in his chest, and he refused to run from it.

Bored, a single red eye glared down at him.

Naruto clenched his fists, feeling the water stir up and rush past his legs. It nearly knocked him off balance, but he kept his footing.

The eye narrowed. Lips peeled back to reveal gleaming teeth. "Pest," the monster in the cage spat.

Naruto swallowed his fear and bared his teeth right back: "Coward."

Claws struck through the bars, straining to tear him apart. Naruto flinched and woke up in his apartment. Pulse racing, he stood and splashed his face with water from his kitchen sink. Then he went back to his couch and shut his eyes.

* * *

AN: Fixed the formatting. Hope you enjoyed.


	3. Chapter 3

AN: This chapter has a nonlinear timeline. There will be jumps back to the past. Thanks to everyone who reviewed the last two chapters!

* * *

(Present Day)

Naruto raced along the streets of Kohona, his chest thumping wildly as he ducked his way through the crowds. If he could just get out of the stupid onsen district, he could make it to the main shopping district! Simple henge, and he could ditch these losers.

Sure, for once he actually hadn't done anything, but if he admitted that, he'd just look guilty for all the other times he ran. Plus, having half a dozen shinobis' undivided attention was nearly as good as ramen, and he enjoyed the thrill of it. Naruto was damn good at running away. He knew the streets like the back of his hand. Every easy switch, every back entrance, all the good hiding spots. It was nice to be good at something.

He clipped through the shopping district, deciding to go for a challenge. The threat of unexpected rain, a sky full of dark clouds and strong winds, meant that the shopping district was going nuts-and that the frenzy would only provide cover for another ten minutes. They would look for him there, and it would buy him time to set up something fun. He hadn't planned anything for today, but if he was going to be in trouble, it might as well be for something he decided.

He needed to be unpredictable! Unstoppable! The future Hokage would make daring escapes with all due carnage and collateral!

Just as he was considering the perks of bringing the eastern library to its knees, something grabbed him by the back of his jacket. Then the world blurred, jerked, and turned right over on it's side. By the time Naruto could get a grip on himself and his dizziness, he was no longer in the alley connecting the main shopping district to the library.

He was in the Hokage tower. The very crowded Hokage tower, prickling with contained upset.

Naruto looked around at the dozens of shinobi in the room, all stern and pissed and at attention lining the round walls; at the Hokage with his eyes narrowed in a way that indicated he meant business; at the absolutely furious man on the left of the desk, whose pale eyes and blank face held nothing; at Iruka, standing to the right, all grim and tight-jawed with such a serious look in his eyes.

Naruto still said, with all due eloquence, "Damn. Nearly had it."

* * *

(Nine months previous.)

The thing in the sewer was a prickly bastard on the best of days, but once Naruto got the hang of keeping his grip, it didn't really talk as much. It glared and seethed, and then settled into ignoring him. Naruto took that as a personal challenge.

He asked for a name. A reason. An explanation.

The asshole took a nap.

Naruto hadn't spent all that time learning to stand just so he could get ignored. If he wanted that, he could go literally anywhere else. The silence made him lose his temper pretty easily, and then he would have to scrabble to keep his balance. He responded by monologuing. Having a captive audience had at least one benefit, and Naruto could tell the thing hated it.

"So I had to start a big argument because the guy refused to accept my answer! Even though I had the same points, just because it wasn't 'standard.'" Naruto stuck his tongue out and continued pacing around the cavern, trying to test how close he could get to the bars without feeling sick. "And then, Iruka got me ramen because I did get the right answer, even if it wasn't the, uh, 'usual' way to go about it. He said I was unique, dattebayo, and I'll take that over some dumb book definition any day."

"That's cute," The thing in the cage murmured softly.

Naruto choked on his words, surprise knocking him out of his rant. The first words spoken to him in weeks. . . and they weren't what he had been expecting. Despite the uneasiness in his stomach, he took a step forward. He could make out the glimmer of a sharp grin in the dark. "What?" He asked, and it came out quietly. It rippled over the sheen of water on the floor. "What's cute?"

"That you love a person who despises you."

Ice poured down Naruto's spine. Water came in waves, buffeting his legs as the level rose. "He doesn't. I don't."

"You adore people for the barest scraps of attention. Like a mutt." The demon peaked open an eye. "Have you forgotten the endless anger you have for the same man? Has one meal filled the pit in your heart?"

Naruto brought a hand up to cover his mouth on reflex, but he didn't throw up. He didn't even gag.

He had talked about Iruka to this thing. A lot. Every slight or moment of anger or odd look. Naruto talked about it all, because no one ever listened to him, and he just wanted to pretend someone would.

It looks like someone had listened.

The demon's claws raked against the bars, and it hissed, "It appears not," and the waves knocked him under the muddy water.

Naruto woke up at the park. He didn't make it off his swing before he spat out acid and a mouthful of barely chewed noodles.

Naruto pushed questions away the same as he did with feelings, and he did it for the same reason. Old man third rarely gave him answers to much of anything. His teachers acted like he was a moron when he dared to interrupt class.

Questions were more trouble than they were worth, especially if Naruto couldn't figure them out on his own.

But he couldn't help but wonder: What was this?

Was he crazy? He didn't feel like it. Most of the time at least.

What was the creature? Why could he communicate with it? Where was the sewer? Was it even real? Could it hurt him? What would happen if he opened the lock?

Did other people know?

Could they feel that there was something wrong with him? Did they sense the hatred that hung around the cage? Is that why they avoided him, scorned him, ignored him? Did they know something he didn't, or had they always been able to sense something wrong with him?

Did the Hokage know? Did his teachers? Did the kids in his class?

Were they right to hate him?

Naruto strolled into the sewer his arms clasped behind his head. "So what's a mutt like you doing in a cage like that?"

The creature didn't even twitch. It feigned sleep.

Fine. Naruto would just have to get better at asking the right questions. And he could grow some thicker skin while he was at it.

* * *

(Present day)

"Naruto," The Hokage said lightly. "How kind of you to join us."

Naruto risked a glance over his shoulder at the ninja who brought him in. His rude expression faltered the sight of a ceramic animal mask. His teeth click shut. Purple hair. Long. Unless it was a wig, he'd know to look out for this one in the future. He hadn't even seen 'em coming. "Yeah. I didn't realize it was something serious," he said, refusing to be cowwed. "I see chunin, I think we're just playing around, ya know?"

Iruka's expression doesn't twitch at that one, but it's fine. Naruto could practically hear someone's blood pressure rising, so he counts it as a win.

The Hokage smiled, the kind so bland it makes you close your eyes so it can be somewhat believable.

Naruto couldn't tell if the old man expected him to know it was fake. He responded with his own chuckle, scratching sheepishly at the back of his head. He didn't love to piss off the old man, even through he had made his way on to Naruto's shit list for various reasons. The third hokage was one of the few people who didn't treat him weirdly. Naruto appreciated that. Even if he had ignored and avoided the old man for a while, Naruto's grudge had simmered out and he knew enough to have some respect for the hat, especially in front of company.

"Ah, yeah, sorry for the trouble. But I can say for certainty-this time-it wasn't me. I've been super well behaved, dattebayo!"

"You're certain of that?" The old man raised an eyebrow, but he didn't seem that upset. He seemed hopeful, in fact.

Naruto thinks on it for a good fifteen seconds. He definitely had done nothing illegal or otherwise in the past week. He double checked Iruka's expression, but the guy just looked a bit uncomfortable at second glance. So, the old man and Iruka could potentially be counted on, and that's really all the encouragement Naruto needs to nod. "What's my crime? I got an alibi."

"I think some context might best explain our reasoning."

Somehow, those few words are all it took for Naruto to lose even the shakiest bit of optimism.

The Hokage continues, "Do you remember our last chat?"

* * *

(Eight months previous)

Iruka showed them storage and explosion tags during their unit on advanced ninja gear. Naruto snapped to attention so quickly that his neck cracked.

The papers weren't nearly as simple as the sheet over the lock in the sewer, but Naruto recognized the similarity. Containment. Storage. Binding.

Seal.

It made sense, a dangerous amount of it. Naruto listened with rapt attention as Iruka passed around a few inert storage tags. His classmates poked at them, curious. Naruto had to bite his tongue so he wouldn't vault over his desk and snatch it out of bug-guy's hand.

When Naruto finally got a hold of one. . . it didn't make any sense. He stared at the characters and lines and strange formatting, and it looked so needlessly complicated that wanted to slam his head against his desk.

Iruka drew their attention back to the front. "Now, one of the neat things about seal activation is that unless you program specific levels, a seal will either activate or not. It is an all or nothing impulse." He held up an explosion tag for the class to see. "I can channel my chakra into the seal, but until I reach the limit required, I will not lose any. This means you can get a reference for how much chakra is required to make tags, and why there is such a high demand for them."

Then Iruka channeled chakra into the explosion tag, causing the class to go wild with various levels of awe and fear. Iruka got tired of it quickly. "Settle down! I wouldn't try this if it were dangerous. I don't have nearly enough chakra to make a dent in this tag, not without channeling for several minutes."

Mizuki grinned, and he held up an identical tag. "Who wants to take a crack at it?"

Of course everyone did: Some were more enthusiastic (Kiba and Ino) and others more studious (Sakura). But Mizuki walked around and gave everyone a chance to channel chakra into the tag. Some seemed more surprised or grossed out by the sensation. Naruto practically vibrated with excitement. He hadn't thought to try channeling chakra, but that might make more sense than reading.

Iruka looked strangely constipated once Mizuki turned to Naruto's side of the class. "Naruto, I'm not sure if-"

Naruto felt a surge of panic, and he jumped to his feet. "Please! Come on, I love explosions."

Iruka raised an eyebrow. "That's what I'm worried about."

"Then I hate em!" Naruto bowed, dramatically and pleadingly, ready to whine and complain for the rest of the day if necessary. Iruka's doubt singed his sensibilities, but the pay off. . . Naruto now had a frame of reference for the thing inside him. "Sensei, come on, I can't even manage a clone."

Iruka shook his head, but out of left field, Mizuki said, "Ah, let him give it a go!"

Naruto stared in shock. "Huh?"

Mizuki handed it over, and his grin was the same one he gave to every other student. Naruto almost didn't take it. But then his elation overcame his surpirse, and he eagerly took the tag.

Naruto gripped the paper, his eyes bright with excitement. His chakra took a moment to get with the program, but he forced it to flow into the seal. It felt strange. Like there was a pressure and a direction to the way chakra soaked into the paper.

"Naruto," Iruka warned, "If you try to include these in your pranks, it will not be fun."

Now, there was an idea. . . that would definitely end badly. Naruto didn't quite shelve the prospect yet. Explosions would be a great distraction! Just not around people.

Still, he couldn't let Iruka have the last word. "What!? I would never! It's just really super cool and. . . glowing?" Naruto stiffened as the sensation of his chakra disappeared. Like a first-bite-out-of-ramen amount of chakra, just gone in a blink. "Iruka-sensei. . . why is it glowing, dattebayo?"

Iruka froze. He put on a wooden smile. "Naruto. Put that down, alright? Don't channel any more chakra. Don't drop it."

Naruto's chakra did what it always liked to do in stressful moments: it lashed out.

The tag started smoking. Before Naruto could even blink, he flew halfway across the room and slammed into Kiba: Akamaru yelped, Kiba cursed, and Naruto heard the seam at the back of his jacket tear.

The window lining the side of the classroom exploded outwards in a rain of glass, and Mizuki's kunai hit the tag midair, sending it flying.

The explosion rocked the walls, heat washing over the stunned classroom.

Iruka stood at the frontline, his shoulder braced against the desk that had previously occupied the front of the classroom. He dropped it after a tense moment and turned to see if anyone was injured. The barking command in his voice cut off the buzz of shock that swept over the room.

Naruto couldn't take his eyes off the wooden table. There were gouges lining the front. The red paint bubbled and blistered, letting off a few thin streams of acrid smoke. The scent of it sat in Naruto's mouth like a hunk of rubbery meat.

It didn't occur to him, between the hell he had raised and trouble he had got into with the headmaster, to wonder how the hell he had managed to activate the seal. Not until later that night, when he was lying awake and staring at the ceiling, his gut twisting up with fear and stress.

"Was that you?" He asked the monster.

It didn't answer, even when Naruto begged.

It turned out there wasn't much of anything in the library about fuuinjutsu, and it felt like a big rip off that his most recent attempt at learning was a bust. Naruto didn't let that stop him. He hung around after class on a day about a week after the explosion tag incident (and had been super quiet and unobtrusive to curry some good favor) and cornered Iruka before he could escape (like he had when Naruto brought up the subject of the explosion itself). "Ne, Iruka, where's the materials for seals?"

Iruka seemed surprised to see him, which means Naruto had chosen the right moment. He'd been distracted today, going off on tangents that he didn't really intend to follow through on. He seemed in a hurry, but that was something Naruto could manipulate. He knew how to be annoying enough that it wasn't worth it to deny him. It how he got pretty much anything done.

"Because I went to the library," Naruto said before Iruka had a chance to ask, "and there was NOTHING! I mean, isn't that supposed to be the center of all knowledge and all that? And you were talking about how cool and useful the whole thing was and-"

"Well, there wouldn't be," Iruka said. He looks more wary than bewildered, but Naruto restrains himself from adding on a mountain inane details. Iruka was one of the few people who would see through that bullshit. "Sealing is a very. . . guarded art. It's dangerous, both in it's applications and the risks involved in learning."

Naruto can't help but look at the replacement table at the front of the room. The windows had been fixed. The trees had recovered from the few fires that caught in the topmost branches. Even the walls had been repaired. But the table was different. A reminder, that no matter how much Naruto wanted to shove away the incident and forget, there was something strange. Something tangible to the cage he visited.

"So ya need to request it? Does the academy have anything? Because I'm not interested in explosions, I swear, I just thought maybe I could learn some more about it, ya know?"

Iruka shakes his head. "No. There are no learning materials. You might as well ask me how to forge a kunai or concoct a poison. It's a highly specialized skill that requires a teacher, and Kohona's few sealing masters are not going to teach an academy student."

Naruto frowned. "Well, you take hot metal and do stuff to make a kunai. You find toxic things and make 'em potent enough to hurt. Are you saying there's nothing about it?"

"No."

And that's where Naruto realized Iruka was lying. Iruka thought about things. He considered Naruto's questions, even the dumbest ones. He might yell or get pissed off because he thought Naruto was messing around, but once the vein in his forehead went away, he got this little furrow between his eyebrows and he _thought_. He came up with analogies, and when those didn't make sense, he found another and another and another. He had spent a whole week finding ways to talk about chakra, because 'students all understand the world differently' and he wanted to teach.

So when he answers, up front, without the slightest bit of consideration, Naruto stares at him. He stares and stares, and he finds that Iruka is still wary, but now for a different reason. It looks less like he's expecting a trap, and more like it has already been sprung.

Naruto grits his jaw, and he averts his eyes so he won't start yelling. He's not stupid. "Yeah, yeah. Whatever." So there might be something, there might not. Naruto would just have to comb through all his options. He'd have to crawl around and listen carefully and pluck gently any opportunity he stumbled across. Like trapping crickets.

Iruka's eyebrows furrow, and he glances between Naruto and the clock. "I have to go, but-"

Naruto rolls his eyes and walks away. "Don't let me keep you. There's nothing. Boo-hoo, woe is me, and all that."

He's used to being disappointed.

The old man took the time to visit Naruto while he was running around. It felt organic, like an accident. Naruto had been so excited to see the old hokage, because he never failed to look happy to see him. Even when Naruto did something wrong or caused a scene, and he needed to be stern, he never really got angry. He never looked full of hate or fear.

When Naruto yelled about his dream to be hokage, and threatened to take that stupid hat one day, the old man didn't look annoyed or bring up his track record or scoff. He smiled. And that was enough to make Naruto unbearably happy, the kind of happy that felt like drinking sunlight and watching a truly beautiful summer thunderstorm form in the sky.

Naruto didn't talk about that feeling to the monster. He didn't mention it to anyone, because he knew it would spoil like the milk in his fridge. That feeling was for him, and him only.

After a few pleasantries (Naruto did enjoy listening to the old man wax poetic about nature, even if he didn't really care about the subject), the hokage mentioned, "And I heard about your incident during the sealing unit. How are you faring?"

Naruto pushed down the impulse to proclaim that it wasn't his fault. Especially since there wasn't an actual accusation. "I mean, it scared the crap outta me. But Mizuki said repeat channeling can cause a glitch sometimes, and that he should have checked the tag better." He doesn't mention asking Iruka about more, because he was curious if the hokage knew about that too.

It turned out that Iruka did, even if the old man didn't say it outright: "Did that 'spark' your interest, as one might say?"

Naruto groans at the pun, but he owns up to it. "Explosions are so flashy! Come on, old man, you got a ton of scrolls. Aren't there any on sealing?"

The old man lectures him on subtly and the shinobi arts not being about flashy jutsu, and Naruto doesn't mention that the idea of using explosions actually made him a bit sick.

"Okay, okay, I get it!" Naruto begged. He whined and pleaded and asked after it, because he knew it would help him.

"Sealing is reserved for genin," the old man said, which didn't answer Naruto's question. "So I cannot offer you anything on the subject. Please don't go chasing after the it."

"But-"

"No," the old man said simply. "It will not happen, Naruto."

Iruka had certainly tattled, and the fact made him irrationally angry. Even then, Naruto grumbled but he agreed. He shrugged and then begged twice as hard for the old man to teach him a cool ninjutsu, despite not really being interested. And when that didn't work, he threw a fit that was only partially feigned.

He needed to cover his tracks. Not be suspicious. Even though it felt like he wanted to rip his hair out because now he couldn't be upfront about looking into the subject, he let only the slightest bit of disappointment show. He could ignore Iruka and certainly disobey him. But not the Hokage. Not if he wanted to look normal.

Naruto loved the old man, and that's precisely why he didn't want to reveal what a freak he was.

It would occur to him, weeks after the fact, that Iruka had needed to go because he had to make a report to the old man. It made several odd phenomena tie together into a neat web. The feeling of being watched. The sudden quiet in his apartment building. How his instructors kept an annoyingly close eye on him. The chat with the hokage was just the thing that made it clear.

It occurred to him mainly because the demon pointed it out. It never tired of making Naruto upset, although it had started working less as Naruto grew used to the mind games. It was easier to accept some things than to fight about them. Yeah, yeah, he was a failure and he sucked and he couldn't pass his classes and boo-hoo. Naruto's irreverent attitude drove the monster up the wall once it realized he wasn't as easy to bait.

Of course, the monster was a bit like Naruto in that it didn't quit, but merely switch tactics. So, now it settled for making him paranoid and (when the opportunity presented itself) being right. It became a weird game for Naruto: the monster was wickedly smart, but it also liked to cause him trouble. Naruto still listened more often than not. He could deal with the resentment and he knew how to ignore inconvenient details and he had a sense for when to call bullshit. But that meant he had to pay attention. He had to weigh out the theories given to him; more often than not, they made sense.

Dots connected. Iruka reported him. Maybe sealing wasn't allowed for non-ninja, but maybe that was a load of bullshit.

After spending a few hours running around, climbing the Hokage monument and doing his best to calm the irritation simmering in his skin, Naruto sat at the base of a tree. Iruka hadn't mentioned Naruto's questions because he wanted to help. He did it so the hokage would cut him off. His teacher could have just as easily not mentioned anything. It wasn't a big deal. It was normal to be interested in a ninja art.

It drove Naruto insane because he couldn't determine if other people knew. If there was a reason Iruka told the old man. If the old man forbid sealing from Naruto specifically.

If everyone in the world was in on a big secret, except for him.

But that also felt a bit too paranoid.

Naruto pressed his spine against the smooth bark, and retreated to the cage. He didn't bother saying hello to the monster. It stared at him, awake and unblinking. "You feel hate," It murmured.

"I'm annoyed," Naruto corrected. He walked forward; his emotions firmly controlled. "Try not to kill me. I know it's really tempting."

He had a seal. It was at his fingertips, if he could be brave enough to reach for it.

* * *

(Present Day)

"Yeah, I guess. You told me to pass my genin exam, which didn't happen."

"I'm referring to your interest in sealing."

Naruto shrugged, his brain whirling as he tried to keep his memories straight. "Yeah, you said it was too complicated. Why is it important?"

"Because you never spoke about it again, and yet your behavior reflects a different story. You began sleeping through classes. Not talking to your peers. You instructors noted you were withdrawn and unmotivated."

'Noted' is a pretty cowardly way to say 'reported.'

Naruto held his ground. "I was a bit frustrated, yeah. I had some bad dreams and it exhausted me."

"Yes," the Hokage agreed. "That is what you told young Iruka." Iruka remains motionless besides the hokage's desk. He stares straight ahead, to the back wall, looking right over Naruto's head without the decency to be smug. Instead, there's a little furrow between his eyebrows, the kind he get's when Naruto's being difficult and he can't muster the energy to be angry about it.

* * *

(Seven Months Previous)

"Naruto," Iruka said tiredly as class ended for the day, "Stay behind, please." A taunting oooooh rose up from the back row. Kiba shoots him a cocky grin that fails to come across as friendly. Ino looks pleased, probably because he had taken special care to ruin her hair during taijutsu practice and she wasn't satisfied with a simple win.

Naruto rolled his eyes at his classmates' jeers, but he picked his head off the table. "Yeah, yeah. Just don't take too long."

Iruka's eye twitched at the insult, but he waited for the last stragglers to filter out before curtly waved Naruto forward. Iruka put on his sternest expression, the kind he saved for lectures Naruto was bound to find especially boring. "You've been sleeping through classes and skipping. That's going to stop. You can't slack off just because you get bored, Naruto."

Naruto sneered at him. It figured. Iruka always had to keep moving to goal post. "You told me to quit being such a distraction! Well, look: no distractions!"

"You need to pay attention, too! Your scores have been dropping, and you can't afford to go any lower." Iruka sighed, his expression pinched and pained. "You're scraping along as is. If you want to be eligible to apply for early graduation, you can't keep doing this."

Naruto ignored the way his stomach turned in fear. He needed to graduate. He needed access to the genin library if he wanted any hope of understanding what the hell was going on inside him. "No one else has a problem with it! They all seem thrilled."

His teacher was too easy to rile up. Iruka slammed his palms on the desk and shouted, "That's because they don't care if you fail!"

Naruto scoffed. Big news. "And you do? Hah, I don't need it, dattebayo." Naruto casually observed the vein popping out from Iruka's forehead, the same one that pulsed when class just wouldn't behave. The sight of it weighed strangely on his chest. Was this how he looked when he started screaming and slinging insults?

It looked kinda pathetic.

Iruka reached up to rub at his temples, forcing himself to calm down. "You are my student," he recited. "Of course I care."

Naruto didn't buy it. Not for one second. If Iruka cared, he wouldn't hide things. He would have helped Naruto the one time he came to ask about a topic that held his interest. Instead, he cut Naruto off. He reported Naruto to the Hokage, which earned him an interrogation. Iruka lost the right to give a shit, even if he acted nicer than the average instructor.

Naruto's scalp prickled with his building outrage, his regret at being dumb enough to ask a question he actually cared about, but if Iruka realized how much it had hurt, Naruto's story of a passive interest in fuuinjutsu would fall apart. It would collapse into a pile of questions he couldn't answer, not without admitting there was something seriously wrong with him.

He needed to relax. Chill out. Get some stuff off his chest.

With barely a thought, Naruto shut his eyes and inhaled. He dropped through the floor of the classroom and exploded out from the water.

The demon cracked an eye open, but it saw no need to respond to his ensuing passionate rant.

Naruto stomped through the water and screamed out his frustrations.

"-and he's LYING! He sold me out the first time, and now he wants to pretend!" Naruto growled, and he kicked at the calf-deep muddy, mucky water. "It's always shut up, Naruto and quit messing around and the SECOND I tried harder, he shut me down."

"Are you done?"

"No! I hate it when they pretend-like I can't see how they look at me. Iruka may be nicer than the others, he may apologize or treat me to food, but I know he thinks there's something wrong with me!"

The demon sighed. "Are you done?"

Naruto glared at it. It seemed so tired recently. Less cutting. "Yeah, yeah. Thanks for your stunning support, as always."

Naruto opened his eyes before he finished exhaling. "I get nightmares." At Iruka's confusion, and then worried stare, Naruto shrugged. He'd had nightmares for years, on and off things that made his sleep restless and unfulfilling. So it was the truth. He would always brush them off upon waking up, but recently his sleep had been more polluted. He woke up with a racing pulse, sometimes tangled in his sheets, sometimes on the floor with a crick in his neck. He knew it was the monster in his head, and that didn't change the fact that he needed to nap. "That's why. I'm really tired, and it helps to hear people."

Iruka's mouth pursed. He pulled out the chair from behind his desk and nodded his head for Naruto to sit (which he did easily enough because rolling chairs were cool). "What kind of nightmares?"

Naruto swiveled around and around, finding it a lot easier to sit still and focus. The classroom blurred into a fascinating spiral of beige walls and warm wood and dark blue. "A thing wanting to kill me. Lotta graphic threats about being eaten, mauled, impaled-kinda basic, in all honesty." He drew up his legs to his chest and spun around all the faster. "Just-super-tiring," he called out, as dizziness started catching up with him.

Iruka reached out and brought Naruto's spinning adventures to a smooth halt, preventing him from slumping out of the chair with a gentle hand that made Naruto nearly flinch. "It's not normal to have nightmares," he said slowly, "especially every night.

Blinking, Naruto tried to find a decent response. While he was at it, he searched Iruka's eyes. Did he know? Did he know more than Naruto? "Guess I'm not normal," he finally replied with a shrug, noting the way Iruka's expression tightened. He ignored how warm his shoulder felt.

The academy instructor recovered quickly enough. He straightened up and tapped his chin, obviously thinking. A bit too obviously. "Do you eat right before bed? Sugar? Or things you might be allergic to?"

Naruto shrugged again, unsure where this sudden surge of concern came from. "Uh, I eat whenever, ya know?" He didn't want to admit to Iruka that there was something wrong with him, even if everyone knew it, but he matched Iruka's exact brand of honesty: obviously dancing around something vital. "Can that give you bad dreams?"

Iruka launched into a mild lecture about proper eating and the proper time for eating. Most of it flew over Naruto's head because he stopped paying attention once he realized Iruka had grabbed onto the easiest explanation. Food was easy to solve, and Iruka, despite his altruistic streak lately, didn't seem to really want to go past that.

Admittedly, it was also easier for Naruto to just look like he was paying attention for a few minutes, all starry-eyed, and go, "Wow! Never knew! I'll try that out."

Easiest con he ever played, and it meant that he had time to go do something productive. Naruto raced out of the academy, deciding to take a stroll through the town. He didn't necessarily feel like picking a fight, but it helped to remember why he was angry. It made him stupid enough that he didn't need to be brave.

One needed to be very brave to get near the seal above his head. Or dumb enough. To get there, Naruto had to scale the bars of the cage (and avoid the occasional claw swipes that would attempt to catch him off guard), but he knew it wasn't exactly physical. He could move faster than light through his mindscape, but he could also get trapped in the weirdest blocks. He could climb, and he used his hands to do it. . . but it wasn't really his hands. It tired him out in a strange way that left no strained muscles or achey limbs. He was climbing, and he always had a body, but it wasn't really his body.

A few weeks ago, Naruto had realized he could raise the water levels in his head and swim up. But again, it wasn't really water. It was a mess of nasty emotions that he usually let go of. But if he wanted to get close, he had to hold them close. It wasn't fun, but it was fast. Or it could be, if he could figure out how to do it.

When the water rose, he could swim his way up to the seal. He knew that. However, the first few times, he drowned himself. He choked and floundered and inhaled all sorts of nasty, foul debris, and he still refused to quit.

He knew he could, and so he would. He had to understand what was inside him. He had to know what the seal did, because the distinction was an important factor to whether or not he could sleep at night. His curiosity and his need to know drove him to endure, even when it left him exhausted, frustrated, and buzzing with hateful thoughts.

It made him all the more victorious when he succeeded.

The first time Naruto burst up from the murky water, gasping for air that was never really air, he had screamed in victory. The demon in the cage watched him with a poisonous expression, but it retreated into the shadows and let him explore the secretive sheet of paper.

Naruto looked at it, read the characters, absorbed it into his brain-but he wasn't really reading. He felt the seal as much as he saw it. Forcing the blurring, shifting characters into something resembling stillness required focus. It required touch, in a way that was far more than surface level examination. The feeling of it creeped through his body, and he could understand the way the seal worked because he knew it. Like how his wrist could only bend so far, or how he could slow his heartbeat if he focused, or the sense of a current that ran through him when he meditated his way into the sewer.

When he pressed his hands lightly over the seal, it felt like he found another body part he never knew about. It had veins and a pulse. It quickened and slowed with his own feelings. It sparked in the seconds before the demon lashed out. The components and pathways fit together and branched out and interwove into a cage and a distillery and a promise. The lines of the seal anchored into him, and he searched it's winding and woven paths until he could feel it even without being in the sewer.

"You know something when you take it apart," the demon rumbled. "Remove it and you will be free."

Naruto knew enough to understand that was an awful idea. It was a seal, and he knew it made him into a container. And he couldn't let this hateful thing out of its cage. Instead, his voice refusing to remain steady despite how much effort he poured into keeping control, he asked, "Who did this?"

It had stared at him for a long time. "Wouldn't you want to know?"

Naruto wasn't going to get any help from the angry, stupidly unhelpful monster in the sewer. He wouldn't get help from the academy, or the Hokage, or Iruka.

Fine. It still wasn't going to stop him.

* * *

(Present Day)

"Yeah, and it was true!" Naruto stared at the hokage with a challenging expression, even though he kept his voice light. "Turns out that when you leave a kid alone all the time, there's no one to deal with the monsters under the bed."

That didn't warrant a response. Instead, the old man asked, "I would like to understand why the subject, of all of the more academic shinobi arts, caught your interest."

This was a chance to either redeem himself or dig his grave, and it boiled down to how vulnerable he could stomach being in front of dozens of shinobi. "I liked being good at something," Naruto admitted. He restrained himself from scowling, but only barely.

"I'm not sure I understand."

He wanted a fucking list? Naruto grit his jaw before he decided it wasn't like he had any pride anyway. If the old man needed it spelled out since he hadn't been paying any attention, then Naruto might as well make a show of it. The demon in the sewer had driven home all his shortcomings, all the things Naruto used to deny or dance around. It stopped hurting a while ago. It was simple fact: it didn't matter why he wasn't good or how much effort he put in to change things, because as it stood-

"My taijutsu sucks. Genjutsu nonexistent. I don't have the talent for the most basic ninjutsu," Naruto listed off, counting on his fingers as he went, "Not good with basic weapons, don't have the money or connections for more advanced instruction, don't have any clan techniques by virtue of being a bastard orphan, not good at reading or code breaking, and I'm plain awful at pretending."

Before the Hokage could say anything to that, Naruto sucked in a dramatically large gulp of air and continued, "Can't do poisons because I'm too stupid to follow instructions or remember which is which. I've observed that my charisma must be somewhere in hell because I've never managed to charm literally anyone! I suck at tracking. I poisoned two of my classmates with mushrooms that I could have sworn were edible." At this point, Naruto ran out of fingers by even the most generous of estimates, so he just started pointing at random objects and people, waiting for the Hokage or someone to cut him off.

Potted plant: "Don't know how to forage for food."

Iruka: "Can't pay attention."

Tall, dark, and angry: "I can't regulate my emotions."

Portrait of the Yondaime: "My crowning achievement is growing creeping vines out of that guy's nostrils this spring."

"You're good at public speaking," the Hokage interjected, his tone level and a bit joking.

That's fine. Perfectly fine if he thinks it's a joke. It is a joke, kinda. Naruto rolled his eyes. "I figured if there was literally any shinobi art that could make use of a blunt instrument like me, it would be the one where you can convert lots of chakra into cool effects. No skill required. It looked really difficult to screw up, so, yeah, I was a bit obsessed with it."

"That is not how the art of sealing works, Naruto. It's a complicated-"

Naruto shrugs. "I wouldn't know. It's a village secret, apparently."

It looked like his disrespect rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

The old man didn't even have the decency to respond to that either. With a wave of his hand, he dismissed most of the shinobi. Iruka stayed. The old hokage glanced to a long-haired man who had been standing behind the desk. He stepped forward and began talking, but Naruto stopped paying attention the instant he did. He saw his eyes: coldly hateful, but also moon-white. However, in the shadow of that man, with pale eyes and fine silk clothes, was Hinata Hyuuga.

Hinata stood silently, her head bowed and bangs covering her face.

And with that one piece of information, everything clicked into place. It culminated into a realization:

She did it.

And then that realization took a turn for the worse:

She did it, **and she got caught.**


	4. Chapter 4

Thank you to all the kind reviewers from last chapter! ff really messes up my formatting, but im glad I could get this out on time. Like last chapter, this is a nonlinear narrative! there WILL be flashbacks. if that bothers you, idk what to tell you. go somewhere else? anyways, i hope this clears up the questions left by last chapter.

* * *

(Five months previous)

"So you don't really talk to anyone, huh?"

Hinata startled, yelping into her bite of onigiri and whipping her head to the side.

Naruto jerked back in surprise, nearly tripping over the tree roots. He pinwheeled his arms, stumbling to regain his balance. "Ah! Sorry, sorry!"

Oh. Hinata's eyes widened, her face rapidly heating. She looked so foolish, with half chewed rice spat all over her dark pants. Frantically, she brushed at her lap, managing to squeak a single breathy and broken apology. She bit at her cheek as Naruto stared at her, and she couldn't meet his eyes.

The silence hung in the air oppressive and ugly. Naruto let off a single weak laugh, like he always did whenever he failed a jutsu or answered a question he truly thought was right. "I, uh, was wondering if I could sit. With you. For lunch." He rubbed at his neck, eyes closed with the force of his grin.

Hinata didn't say no. She slowly nodded her head, glancing back to the courtyard to see if anyone might be paying attention to the two of them. However, Naruto had been the quietest he'd ever been for the past few days, and without the effort to make himself visible people chose to ignore him.

At her permission, Naruto dropped into a squat and opened up his own bento. It had a bag of barbeque chips and a large carrot. He ate as quietly as one could with crunchy foods, but he still finished long before her. "So. . . You don't talk, right?"

Hinata dropped her gaze, slightly calmer but still the slightest bit bewildered. She shook her head.

Naruto hummed, his face scrunching up as he analyzed her. The intensity of his stare made her grit her jaw, a quiet flicker of unease running through her.

Finally, he nodded decisively and stood, brushing the crumbs from his pants. "Cool! See you around!"

He ambled back the academy, arms clasped behind his head. Hinata's stomach twisted with equal measures of relief and disappointment. Naruto talked quite a bit. And that appeared to be a dealbreaker for company. That was fine. Hinata knew the price for her comfort. She had grown content with it, so it was no real loss to watch as Naruto strolled away. No real loss, she told herself again.

The next day, when he returned with little cup of instant ramen, she somehow felt more surprised than the first time.

He dropped to the floor and reached into a weapons pouch. "Can you write?" Naruto looked up to her, head tilted in curiosity, and in his hand was a small, raggedy paper scroll. He held out the scroll and a pen.

Blinking, Hinata couldn't help but wonder if this was a prank. Or a henge. In a moment of hesitant bravery, she accepted them. The pen was warm. The scroll was empty, and she used the lid of her bento box as a table. _Yes._ She wrote, her penship just the slightest bit unsteady.

"Cool!" Naruto said with excitement. She visibly saw him tramp down on it when he asked, "Uh, do you want to write? With me?"

The question made her stomach twist, but she didn't hesitate as she pointed to the single word she had already written.

_Yes._

Naruto's eyes widened. He broke into a grin once more. "Awesome, dattebayo!"

Naruto sat with her during lunch from that point on. He rambled sometimes, but he asked just as many questions. At first, Hinata hadn't know how to respond, so unused to needing to think of what to say. However, Naruto never repeated himself. He waited, quietly, for minutes at a time as she wrote things, scribbled them out, and rewrote them again. Then, only once she had finished her message, he would read it with a scrunched-up expression. He took a long time to think on her words, giving her ample time to eat. When he handed over the scroll, he said his own response. Then he waited again, for minutes at a time, as Hinata figured out what she wanted to say in response.

The first few days, they barely exchanged half a dozen statements. As Hinata got faster at writing, as she got more used to thinking about what she wanted to say, it didn't remain that way.

"Iruka keeps getting on my case about taijutsu," Naruto said, dully irritated. He picked at the grass besides him, his chakra spinning round and round idly at the gate on his stomach. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, it wobbled.. He had gotten a lot better at it. He barely looked like he was focusing anymore.

Hinata released her eyes, realizing that it was probably impolite to stare, despite how pretty the chakra exercise appeared. She tapped her pen against the scroll, considering the issue.

_I think that might-_

_I'm sorry, but I think-_

_I agree. The steps you use are inefficient. He has your best interest at heart._

Naruto stared at the scroll for a long time. Hinata shifted, and it suddenly occurred how rude that had been. She just wanted to write quickly, but Naruto didn't need a lecture from her and-

"Ne, Hinata. . . What do these two words say?" Naruto said softly. He pointed to 'agree' and then 'inefficient,' his expression stiff. His ears were red.

Hinata blinked in surprise, before taking the paper back. She thought on it for a moment. Above agree, she wrote _think yes. true. feeling._ Above inefficient:_ bad. wasteful. failing._

Naruto read the words, and he laughed softly. "Hah, yeah, that makes sense. Uh, thanks. But I really don't have someone to practice with, so I'm stuck with class time, and Mizuki kinda sucks."

Hinata responded, her kanji purposefully simple and interspersed with katakana, but her head was whirling. The next day, when Naruto sat by her, she handed him a small pocketbook.

He blinked in surprise, but as he leafed through the beginner dictionary, his ears grew redder and redder. Hinata bit her cheek, regret washing over her. She saw the potential insult too late: he would think she was calling him stupid, and that always sent him into a screaming match with his teachers-

Naruto laughed, rubbing at the back of his head. "Wow, Hinata, thank you! This is really helpful, ya know?"

Hinata buried her face in her hands, her cheeks bright red. She grabbed the scroll before she could think any better of it: _Taijutsu? I can help._

Naruto looked at her, wide eyed and blinking. Then, his mouth melted into a smile, one that showed no teeth. He looked at her like she occasionally caught Hanabi staring at the moon: "Y-yeah. That would be awesome."

* * *

(Present Day)

"Sorry," Naruto blurted out, covering for the uneasy feeling gripping his chest, "I'm lost. Am I in trouble for. . . hanging out with a classmate during academy hours?" He forced himself to be rude, glaring at the man-Hinata's father-with a sour sneer on his face. "This is bullshit!"

Hinata didn't look up.

Her father glared. "You attempted to manipulate my daughter into divulging clan secrets."

Naruto blinked with the audacity of that statement. "What?" He glanced to Iruka, to the Hokage, but they didn't respond. "I don't know what you're talking about."

The hokage tilted his head, eyes sharp. "Is this how you interpreted the situation, Hinata-chan?"

Hinata hid her hands in the sleeves of her jacket, but Naruto knew she was clenching her fists. She would draw blood if she didn't keep her nails trimmed. Naruto had seen her file them down enough to know. "N-no. He did not ask me. . ." Hinata's voice faded at the end, and her mouth worked soundlessly. "He. . . I . . ."

Naruto couldn't watch it. "Let her write it down."

Hiashi Hyuuga glared at Naruto like a snake, and a wave of animosity crashed over him. Naruto flinched back a step and ran right into the uncompromising wall of the Anbu behind him, his pulse suddenly racing.

"My daughter can speak if she wishes to say something."

"Hyuuga-san," the hokage said in warning. "Please calm yourself." Then he looks to Hinata and inclines his head. Hinata clenches her fists and stares at the floor, drawing in deep but silent breaths.

Naruto bit into his cheek, anger flaring up on his friend's behalf. Her father knew she had trouble. He knew it better than Naruto, and yet he refused to help her. To him, her quietness was another flaw, another weakness, another problem that made her useless and undesirable. There was nothing wrong with Hinata. She had plenty of brilliant things to say. She could communicate perfectly well if anyone would just give her a chance.

Naruto ground his teeth tighter and tighter, and then Hiashi disregarded Hinata, opening his mouth to spout off more bullshit-

"She writes things down," Naruto muttered, his voice growing louder and rougher as the burning in his stomach got hotter and hotter. He ignored the warning squeeze on his shoulder. "That's how she speaks. That's the easiest way for her to talk! If you actually gave a shit about what she had to say-"

Naruto took a step forward, and the whole room shifted. It tilted right off the edge from the precarious balance of ozone-air indifference. Hinata's father looked at him, and that was all it took. It was the danger promised in the expression. Cold fear that sprung up to choke him, and Naruto didn't step back a second time. He froze. Feet rooted to the floor. The whiplash leaves him stunned, still and wide-eyed, pulse faster than a trapped rabbit.

It was the same hate he faced day after day from the monster in the cage. And there were no bars to keep him safe.

"Naruto," the hokage said, and his voice was lower and harsher than he ever, ever used. "Be still. Be quiet."

And Naruto was so stunned in that second, his limbs rubbery and lax with fear, that he did nothing other than obey. Hinata's father averted his gaze.

"Hinata-chan. Please, do you have something to add?"

Hinata lowered her head, her bangs falling over her face and hiding her pale, dull-mirror eyes. Silently, she shook her head.

* * *

(Three Months Previous)

Naruto moved to the back of the class. Not next to her, but along the back wall, next to Shino. He caused no trouble. He picked no fights. In class, he didn't look her way.

Hinata was grateful for it. Naruto was still too infamous to fade away in a small room. He had a presence that drew attention.

Until the class got used to it. Then he sat in an open spot on the second row, next to Choji. He caused no trouble. He picked no fights. He took notes, which shocked a good number of people. In class, he didn't look her way.

The class got used to it. By the time he sat next to her, no one thought anything of it.

_Hi. Hope this is ok?_

Hinata wrote on her own scroll, subtle and calm. _Yes._

* * *

One day, Naruto didn't sit by her in class. His chakra buzzed, prickly and obtrusive enough to get disgruntled stares from the class.

Hinata couldn't find him when lunch came. She bit at her lip, checked to see that no one was watching, and then activated her eyes. Naruto's bright chakra system exploded into view, secluded among the trees south of the courtyard. Hinata relaxed her sight, ignoring the tension building in her skull. She made her way over, purposefully unhurried and idle. Ino called out something to her, but Hinata pretended not to notice.

As she got closer, she noticed his chakra still burrowing and twisting, but contained. He didn't hear her when she sat. He didn't stir for several minutes. When he opened his eyes, he flinched and shrieked "What the hell?!"

Hinata leaped backwards on impulse, her scroll flying from her hands.

Naruto jumped to his feet, glaring at her furiously. "Leave me alone!" And with that, he turned and ran. He didn't come back to class.

He apologized the next time he came to the academy, a week later.

"I didn't qualify for early graduation." he finally said, sitting over ten feet away, behind a tree. Like he couldn't bear to be seen.

Hinata activated her eyes anyway.

"I know it isn't an option for most people, but I begged the old man, and he agreed. I just had to meet the old requirements." He dropped his head in his hands, his voice cracking. "War time requirements. The ones that were so easy we had five-year-olds graduate. I couldn't even manage to get that."

Hinata stood up and slowly walked to stand in front of him. He didn't look up at her.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I was just mad. I didn't mean to yell at you."

Hinata sighed and penned her response. When Naruto didn't stir at the click of her pen, she held out her scroll and dropped it on his head.

Instead of spluttering, or reacting the way she hoped, he hunched over further. Hinata knelt. She took his left hand and eased it away from his face. Then his right. He still didn't look up.

She places the scroll in his hands, rolled to her response:

_Of course I forgive you._

_Now spar with me. I need to get faster._

* * *

"Hmmm," Naruto muttered. He chewed on his thumb nail, and his expression was pinched in deep thought. "Should I prank. . . Kiba? Or the headmaster?" He jumped to his feet to pace, considering the possibilities with increasing excitement. "Iruka? I gotta keep him on his toes."

Hinata quickly penned her response. _Do you have to prank anyone? You'll get into trouble._

Naruto glanced at her with a frown that he quickly hid behind a toothy grin. "Hell yeah I will! That's the point. If I don't raise a little hell, who would I be?"

Hinata raised her eyebrows, unimpressed.

Naruto sighed. They had learned each other's body language enough to know she had questions. And even if he didn't like it, Naruto rarely hid things from her. "Look. . . I know you hate attention. I know you get too much of it."

Hinata frowned, thrown off balance but willing to listen. She. . . didn't talk about her family that often. Naruto tried his best to be pleasant, and that meant he paid attention to what she did and didn't like talking about. And since Hinata didn't try to hide her tense relationship with her clan-since she communicated a boundary and Naruto listened-that meant she had to deal with the discomfort that came with vulnerability.

"-But I don't. People would love to forget I exist. So if the only time people pay attention is when they need to yell, then that's what's gonna happen. I'm not. . . at peace when I'm unnoticed." Naruto rubs at the back of his neck. He sighs and sits down again, picking at a thread unraveling from his cuff. "Because if I don't raise hell, no one will acknowledge me. No one will give me the time of day-they may side-eye me or whisper, but they won't. . ."

Naruto, sometimes, had just as much trouble finding words as her.

"They won't look at me. So if people are gonna treat me badly, it's gonna be because of something I did."

Hinata considered this. A quiet prickle of anger and sadness sprung up in her chest, a little thorny vine that made her regret asking. Because it pained Naruto to admit it, and it hurt her to hear it, and she hated that it existed and that she couldn't understand why. At first, before she met Naruto, she thought he cultivated people's annoyance. She thought it was defiant or brave or childish-and she had to realize that it was all of those things and also none of them

Naruto had a garden full of weeds. People already hated him, without him having to do anything. All he did with pranks and disrespect was plant his own seeds. He made a garden of outrage. He made those glares into something he owned.

_The headmaster._ She wrote. She frowned at the page.

_And get Mizuki, too. He keeps giving back-handed compliments to Sakura. I hate it._

Naruto's look of shock melted into one of excitement. The gears in his head visibly turned, and he whispered, "Ne, Hinata? Have you ever designed a prank before?"

Hinata had not. It didn't remain that way for long.

* * *

Naruto took credit for it, and he took the blame, but in the aftermath, all he could talk about was how well it went. "And the timing? Perfect! Mizuki was so humiliated that it had him spitting."

Hinata couldn't contain her smile. Hesitantly, she held up her scroll. _I may have another idea._

"Ok, so we have the materials," Naruto said. He held the storage tag close to his face, examining it with a clearly hungry expression. The seal itself was about as long as his arm, and he combed over the symbols like he was trying to read them. "And you're sure this thing will hold enough water?"

Hinata remembered the explosion incident. Mizuki had rationalized it as a flaw in the tag, but Hinata could see Naruto's chakra stores. She knew it wasn't a glitch. It has enough room for ten gallons.

"Hmmm." Naruto checked their notes. This was the largest, and certainly most destructive prank yet, and Hinata's propensity to plan out things meticulously had gained Naruto's respect very quickly. He didn't always follow the plan, because spontaneous problem solving was often required, but the scale of his pranks had increased very quickly. "I got the sealant for the doors and the chia seeds. So if we want it to fill the room, we're gonna need. . . twenty-four trips." He groaned. "Damn! So it will need to be an over-night prank, which means I'm definitely going to get caught."

Hinata swallowed, nervousness picking at her. But she stared at her feet and pushed past her discomfort. It was so minor, so easy to look past compared to their first meeting. "I think we can improve the tag."

Naruto doesn't respond, and when she finally glances over, his eyebrows are nearly hidden under his goggles. He jolts when their eyes meet, and he apologizes. "Sorry, I just. . . I mean, it kinda threw me for a loop-"

"I can talk," Hinata blurted out. She winced, and nearly goes to write it down, but she wanted to try. "When I'm. . . when I feel safe." And when she has to. When her father expects an answer, Hinata can force herself to talk, in the same way she can force herself to stand back up despite how her body screams in pain.

"You don't gotta explain," Naruto says quickly. "I mean, it's your business."

Hinata shook her head. "I want to, though. You're the only person who has ever waited for me to speak on my terms."

Naruto laughed. Not a mocking one, but a startled one. Breathy and weak. Like he didn't know what to do with the sincerity in her voice.

"I like writing. But I think I could like talking to you."

"You. . . have a nice voice." At Hinata's ensuing surprise, Naruto laughed again, this time a little hysterical. "Sorry, sorry! It's just weird to hear you, ya know?"

Hinata chuckled in response, her face feeling warm and her throat clear and painless. "It is."

They quickly launched back into business. Naruto's surprise wore off quickly.

"This tag has a storage capacity proportional to the amount of chakra it is primed with." It was sort of an heirloom, a seal that had been copied down for years. The Hyuuga used it to fill a small, specialized pool at the compound in order to train children in water walking. Repeated uses degraded the pathways, so the seals had to be replaced regularly. It had been an easy task to spot the least worn tag and request it for her own meditative purposes. "It's very old and very inefficient compared to modern issued ones. But you have stores to increase it."

Naruto flinched. "I-I do?"

Hinata nodded. "They aren't useful for the average shinobi considering they remain active for a very short time frame, but-"

"No, no, I need to back up. Why do you think I have enough chakra to make a dent? That explosion tag was a glitch, dattebayo."

Hinata shook her head. "I don't think it was. The Byakugan is poor at judging how much raw chakra a person has, but I'm certain that you have enough."

"Byakugan?"

Surprised, and a little taken back, Hinata pulsed chakra to her eyes in a demonstration. The veins around her eyes swelled, and the world dissolved into monochrome intensity. Naruto's star-bright chakra jittered in shock.

"Wait, that's why your eyes do that?!"

After a long conversation about bloodline limits (one where she had to switch over to writing very quickly), Hinata realized that Naruto knew a shockingly small amount of basic knowledge about Kohona's clans. They didn't have the time to plan the rest of the prank because he asked a lot of questions which took a turn for the strange.

"Is there anything weird about my chakra?"

_Not really. Everyone has different traits._

"What does it look like when I do this?" He closed his eyes, and Hinata pulsed hers, and she saw the way his chakra began to spiral over the gate in his stomach.

_Like a meditative exercise. You're cycling chakra through your stomach gate._

"Huh. And there's nothing. . . wrong?" The tension in Naruto's back betrayed him even more than the content of his questions.

_Nothing. It's normal._

"Huh. . ."

However, the next day, she and Naruto worked out the timing, the direct path through the ceiling, and the river closest to the academy that wouldn't noticeably lower. He would hide the tag immediately after he finished, and Hinata would pick it up before class began.

Naruto, with a quick glance to ensure they weren't being watched, pulled out the water storage tag. "So I kept adding chakra. Not sure when I should stop."

_It degrades. It will lessen and leak out over time, so the best time would be while you are filling it._ Hinata penned a set of directions and even a small diagram. It explained how to accept and expel the water.

_Put both hands on it and hold it under the water while you channel. It flows in and out at a set rate, so be careful and leave enough chakra to avoid exhaustion._

Naruto stared at the seal, his expression furrowed in deep concentration. "I really wanted to learn fuuinjutsu. I still do." He smiled at her, his concentration drifting away. No, not drifting-redirecting. Focusing on her. "So this is really cool. And it's a brilliant idea. I wouldn't be able to pull this off without you, ya know?"

Naruto smiled with his eyes closed when he couldn't bear to see how people would respond. He bared his teeth and grinned. It was a defiance and a threat and a display of disrespect and a promise that he gleefully didn't care.

This open-eyed smile, the one that lit up his face and made his eyes glimmer with unguarded happiness?

He only smiled like that when the two of them were alone.

* * *

In the early hours of the morning, when the first unlucky teacher decided to stumble in and brew a pot of stale coffee, they were bowled over by a flood of water which ripped through the hallways. Classes had to be moved outside, and Naruto gleefully owned up to it. Hinata picked up the tag from their chosen hiding spot, and she stored it away in her pouch.

He had burned away through the last of the pathways. It was now just a sheet of plain waxed parchment. She would dispose of it at the compound, because Naruto had been adamant that it couldn't be traced. She agreed.

Naruto wrote notes to her in class, when he was finally allowed to return. _I filled the room to my chest. I only planned for about half of that. They have no clue how I managed. Iruka even looked impressed, despite how angry he got._

_I knew you could._ Hinata scrawled in between her notes, not allowing her expression to reflect her excitement. Mizuki lectured about war strategies that had helped secure difficult battles, but it all seemed rather dull.

_I'm gonna tell them it was jerry-rigged pipes. Bamboo and duct tape and the water pump from my shower. It's gonna drive them insane that they couldn't see it coming._

Hinata couldn't help but feel proud. She didn't like the destruction, and more often than not she refused to help with vicious pranks, but this one made her feel. . . clever. Sneaky and unseen and still powerful.

And a week later, when the chia seeds sprouted overnight through the hallways and in the teacher's lounge cabinets, and Naruto declared his genius to the whole class, Hinata knew he was complimenting her just as much as he was reveling in the attention.

* * *

(Present day)

The hokage sighed at Hinata's silence. "Naruto. I would like to hear your side of the story."

Naruto took half a second to convince himself he didn't feel betrayed. He then dropped into the sewer like a stone. He swam up through the water, buzzing and shaking. The orange-gold light flickered. The pipes hissed.

"Shit," He hissed.

The monster peered at him curiously, and slowly grinned. "Oh," It sang in its growly tone, the note lilting in the air. "You know fear."

"I'm gonna bounce some ideas off you real quick," Naruto blathered. "Ok. I complained about fuuinjutsu and not getting to learn. I was upset because I-" He yelped as the ground shook. "I felt stupid. I kept losing taijutsu matches. I just wanted to yell and vent."

"Dull. Could you not come up with something more entertaining?"

"There's no way in hell I'm lying to the old man!" Naruto shouted, his voice tinged in hysteria. "He can smell it! Like a bloodhound."

"You overestimate the perception of others."

"If I fuck up, Hinata gets burned. I can't risk it."

The monster chuckled. "So noble. You wish to defend her when she can't spare a word towards-"

"Oh, fuck off! Be rude when my ass isn't on the line."

The monster's red eyes look unbearably smug. "You can make this more personal," it offered. "Perhaps not a whole truth, but a partial one. Be clever enough, and it can be convincing."

"Hit me," Naruto said, desperate enough to consider some poisonous advice. It made for good brainstorming help.

"That pathetic human teacher of yours betrayed your confidence once. He insulted you, so you decided to air a long list of grievances."

"Throw Iruka under the bus?" Naruto hated that he didn't immediately refuse. "But he's right there, and I don't want to. . . hurt him."

"He has hurt you," the monster argued. "And if you wish to keep your other lies intact, isn't that a small price?"

Naruto felt sick. Like he drank gallons of foul water and held the weight of it in his stomach. "Iruka. . . he got really angry at me for a prank," he rehearsed. "I got angry at him too. I told Hinata because I couldn't look at him without wanting to explode. I told her about how he shut me down on sealing, and how he reported me for it, because I was ranting about everything."

"You can do better."

Naruto clenched his fists. "How he reported me for it and didn't have the guts to own up to it, or the shame to apologize, or how he thought I was dumb enough to not notice."

The monster rumbled with pleased laughter.

Naruto cursed, feeling anxiety running over his skin. "This is your fault, bastard. Quit being so pleased."

'Hate me," The monster said with a laugh. "I'm sure that will help drag you out of this."

Forcing himself to refocus, Naruto tugged at his hair. "I didn't ask for clan secrets. She acted as a friend. She. . . just wanted me to not be so sad."

"You're very good at begging from the mud," the monster said with a sick amount of praise. Naruto refused to react, because he didn't have time for mindgames. "Humans are so averse to weakness. They look away in disgust, or pity, or even out of joy."

Naruto wished he could feel pain in this place. He wished the demon could, too.

"Show them a rotting wound, and they won't go looking for maggots."

Naruto opened his eyes and finished exhaling. His pulse was too loud. He stared the Hokage dead in the eye and refused to acknowledge his teacher.

"I got really pissed at Iruka-sensei," He stated plainly. "I couldn't look at him without wanting to explode, so I talked to Hinata because she'll listen to me rant. So I ranted. I brought up everything, and I talked to her about fuuinjutsu because he shut me down on the first subject I was interested in, and lied to me about the reasons for it, and reported me to you for it. And he didn't have the guts to own up to it, the shame to apologize, or the braincells to realize I knew he thought I was dumb enough to not know."

That last tongue twister barely made sense to even Naruto, so he barreled on. "I didn't ask for anything, and definitely not clan secrets. I didn't even know if she had access to anything about fuuinjutsu. I just complained that I wanted to learn something, and I couldn't. I didn't say anything about you forbidding me from it. So she didn't know that."

"Hinata. . . just wanted me to not be upset, I guess. If she grabbed anything that was top secret, I know it was out of ignorance." Then Naruto couldn't help but glare at her father. "I didn't conspire. And, besides, Hinata wouldn't have fallen for that. She cares about her family a lot more than me, so she probably considered it inconsequential. If she tried to be sneaky about it. . . I guess it's because you would throw a giant hissy fit over me daring to exist."

The glare he got was truly impressive, but Naruto held his anger close. He sneered and glanced back to the Hokage. The old man didn't give away his thoughts, and nervousness twisted in Naruto's stomach.

"Hyuuga-san," the old man said evenly. "After hearing this explanation, do you still suspect Naruto for attempting to subvert the integrity of the Hyuuga clan?"

". . . His story matches my daughter's without appearing to be the result of previous collaboration. His confusion upon being summoned read as genuine." Hinata's father closed his eyes and tonelessly said, "I rescind my accusation."

* * *

(One week previous)

Naruto hadn't slept in a few days. That much was obvious. He was listless and quiet and he asked strange questions about his chakra.

One day, he dropped into his unusual meditation and came out crying and shaking.

Hinata had felt frozen in the face of it. She hadn't known what to do.

Naruto hugged at his knees and rambled, his voice cracking in and out. "And he didn't let me try. He lied and he must think I'm stupid-I'm deadlast so I am, I guess-and I just wanted to be good at something, ya know?"

She shook her head. "I don't," she whispered.

He clenched his fists. "I think there's something wrong with me," he whispered. "I don't know what's wrong with me."

Naruto had trouble reading. He devoured his little pocketbook, and he had improved, but he still wasn't as good as other students. He couldn't remember to do things. He got frustrated over tiny things and ignored looming obstacles like he couldn't see them.

He had still never talked about himself like this.

"I just need to understand. I'm months away and I'm scared-"

That he wouldn't pass again? That he wouldn't qualify for early graduation?

"Why are you scared?"

He shook his head. "No. Nope. Not gonna happen, dattebayo." And then he took heaving breaths and shook and didn't respond when she tried to calm him. "I just wanted to learn, and they cut me off, so I don't know what they know. Do they know? Is there a reason. . ."

She couldn't console him. He didn't move when it came time to return to class, and if Hinata didn't show up it would be suspicious. Her father would hear.

Hinata grabbed her friend by the shoulders. "Naruto-kun, please. You need to calm down." Her voice failed, and she had to croak, quietly, "You're sca-scaring me."

He wiped and scrubbed at his face and croaked out apologies. "It's that stupid seal. It all comes down to that stupid seal. And I don't have a chance because I can't learn anything, and I don't understand."

Hinata had to leave him. It hurt, but she had to. Her family couldn't know and she couldn't slip. She had kept this a secret for months, and Naruto would forgive her. He would understand. He learned how to fade away for her sake.

She could learn to step up for his. There had to be something she could do.

There was. And it reminded her that even if she felt clever and useful and powerful when no one was watching, all it took was a single stare for that to crumple.

* * *

(Present Day)

Iruka didn't look at Naruto as he walked (escorted) him home. He didn't look pained. He looked like it was just a mission to him.

Naruto kept his silence. If Iruka wasn't bothered, he wasn't going to apologize. It would be a flaw in his story if he backtracked. It would get him questions.

"It was my duty to report on the progress of my class," Iruka finally spoke. "Your interests included."

Naruto chewed on his cheek, and he swallowed back dozens of questions. He asked the ones he didn't care about, the one he already knew the answer to: "Did the old man talk to anyone else about what you said?"

Iruka sighed.

Naruto laughed, hollowly. "Yeah. I thought so. And I bet it's your duty that you can't tell me why."

Hinata didn't look at him. She sat next to her cousin in free times, who was a blank wall of animosity. She didn't open her mouth or look anyone in the eye.

Naruto couldn't catch a moment alone. She avoided him. Didn't look at him. Teachers made him sit at the front of the class, and Naruto responded by being the biggest pain in the ass that he could. He got sent out nearly every hour. He got in trouble. He got yelled at.

It just made him more furious.

He broke into the academy, and he didn't leave any pranks in his wake. He left a note, taped unobtrusively under Hinata's desk.

_Are you okay? Can we meet?_

When he checked again, there was a single response in Hinata's pristine writing:

_No._

Naruto sat where they used to sit. In the space where he had hidden the water storage seal, Hinata left behind her writing scroll. It held no new messages.

He spent more time with the monster. It spoke freely now, soothing and poisonous in the same breath. The pain felt gratifying, somehow. It felt like scratching a bug bite until he drew blood.

"If you weren't evolutionarily programed to be such a bitch," Naruto drawled, sending his chakra snaking through the seal on the cage, "you could get some peace. But now we're back to square one. Aren't you proud?"

The monster glared at him. "If you had kept your incessant mouth shut, you wouldn't have driven away the one creature desperate enough to tolerate a pariah."

The monster had a certain charm. He was just such a horrible fucking person that Naruto couldn't help but be impressed. "Hinata wasn't desperate," he said. "She was like me."

"You are the epitome of desperation. Do you not remember?"

Naruto narrowed his eyes, distracted from the tedious process of examining the seal. "What? Spit it out."

It laughed. "You found that girl strange. Her mannerisms left you uncomfortable and disturbed. You spent hours in frustration, forcing yourself to learn because she was too fearful to speak."

Naruto's jaw grew tight. He bared his teeth. "Past me was a dumbass. Hinata's brilliant. She's just too cool to change for other people." Then, he states with a degree of forced normalcy, "I was supposed to know how to read anyway. She helped me learn."

"Or," the monster argued casually, bypassing Naruto's latter statement in favor of picking at the first, "You are good at forgetting. You're desperate enough to forgive any flaw, ignore any discomfort-because you will get nothing if you can't settle for the bottom tier."

"That makes you bottom of the barrel," Naruto spat. "Drop it. I'm not listening."

In a high, grating imitation of Naruto's human throat, the monster complained, "'She's so weird. Why can't she just talk. It's so annoying.'"

"SHUT UP!"

"I'm merely repeating your own words."

Naruto shook with the force of his rage. "I was stupid!" Yeah, he hadn't really understood at first, but he did now! And he never let himself treat her differently. Hinata didn't need special treatment, because despite what her family thought, there was nothing wrong with her.

"No," it crooned, "That was your only intelligent moment. You found a solution to your plight, and you pretended kindness so you could benefit. Your foolishness was forgetting your purpose. You forgot she was a tool."

"People aren't tools!" Naruto screamed, finally dropping the buzzing and furious mess of a seal. He stood on the surface of the water, and the whole cavern shook and rumbled. "I was-am her friend! Maybe I did it for a dumb reason, but that doesn't change anything!"

The monster hummed in consideration. "Perhaps you have a point. Shinobi are not people, in a sense."

"If I wanted to use a person," Naruto said quickly, "It was probably one of your brilliant ideas."

"No. It was your design. Your desperation." The water shook with the monster's laughter. "Your loneliness merely proved more painful than ignorance."

Naruto sometimes wished he could drown the monster. He wanted to walk into the cage and skin the mutt alive. He wanted to eat its heart raw.

"I remember my previous container," it said, and the hate it exuded felt powerful enough to drown in. "I know shinobi. You will be used until broken. Just as you used a poor, desperate creature."

* * *

(Six Months Previous)

If Naruto had taken to avoiding the Hokage tower, no one really noticed. The old man had gotten busy and blown Naruto off one time too many. Naruto wasn't gonna bother with him until he got an apology, dattebayo!

And it looked like that wasn't going to happen.

Fine, whatever. It's not like he cared.

Instead, Naruto dug at the packed dirt with the toe of his sandal, watching the people of Kohona go about their business. The binding at the front of his shoe was unraveling, and he needed to sew it up at some point. He just couldn't remember where he put his emergency sewing kit, and he had already torn his apartment apart while looking for it, and now he couldn't stand to be there more than necessary. The mess made him feel jittery.

He would clean up. Eventually. He just had to get around to it when the time felt right.

Sighing, Naruto pushed off from his spot outside the gorcery. He could go home, quickly make some ramen, and then get back to. . . whatever he wanted, really. He wished he had something he wanted to do.

As he walked down the road, people noticed him. A father's eyes widened, and his kid yelped ("My hand!"). Naruto stuck his tongue out at him as he passed. A store owner he had pranked a few months previous glared as he strolled by, and he shot her a sarcastic grin. A group of ninja weren't as subtle as they thought, and they noticeably stared at him on their way to the hokage tower. Naruto just rolled his eyes.

He dropped into the sewer mid-step. "Can you die?" This was as much an insult as a legitimate question. "Like, will you starve at some point?"

"Not before you," it answered, and it sounded vaguely pissed off at the fact.

"Ruuuuuuude," Naruto drawled. He approached the bars and got a warning growl for the trouble. "So I'm stuck with you?"

"I'm not the one who insists on you visiting," the monster snapped. "It is entirely your choice to incessantly pick at this place."

"Hmmm. I feel like you're grumpy. Why so grumpy?"

The monster turns away and doesn't dignify the teasing with a response. Naruto counted it as a win. He laughed and said, "I'm just messing with you, dattebayo! Jeez, it's just small talk."

"You're avoiding the eyes of those who would rather see you dead," the monster corrected.

Naruto frowned. He was never sure if the monster could see outside the cage, or if it was just smart enough to find little patterns in Naruto's visits. It never gave him a straight answer. Most of the time it didn't give him an answer period. It didn't matter either way, because Naruto was suddenly jerked out of the sewer.

"Ow!" He dropped his sack of ramen, grabbed his shoulder, and glared at the guy responsible.

Pale, with long, dark hair and a absent expression. He had absolutely no problem shoulder checking Naruto, despite how unconcerned he appeared. But more than anything, there was something oddly familiar about him.

"You might find more success in walking," the boy said plainly, "if you kept your eyes open while doing so."

Naruto couldn't have been distracted for more than a ten seconds, tops. Time didn't flow along normally inside the sewer. And, yeah, judging from the packages in the boy's hand, he had come from the red medicinal shop the next street over, meaning he probably rounded the corner and didn't exactly _mean_ to run into Naruto, but those little facts felt less important in the face of how _rude_ this guy was.

"You might find more success making me regret it if you weren't such an asshole!" Naruto sneered, and he realized that he knew this guy. He attended the academy. He walked home with one of Naruto's classmates-the quiet girl with the same white eyes. Naruto snatched his dropped groceries out of the dirt, debating how badly he should prank the guy's class. Something colorful. His whole outfit was so _bland_. He could use a little green and pink to spice it up. Naruto purposefully shoved past him, mentally tallying how much pigment he would need to make an impression.

The guy sidestepped the worst of his body check, but Naruto's elbow still brushed his arm. The boy hummed tonelessly but didn't retaliate. He had a demeanor that promised to forget you instantly.

Naruto tried to project the same energy, but he had to force himself to not look back as he grappled with another rush of odd familiarity. His rubbed at his elbow, his mind no longer whirling with visions of the colorful monstrosity he would unleash.

He dropped into the sewer. "Did you feel that? Am I right?"

The monster snorted. "Pest."

Naruto ran the rest of the way home, and he ate in his bedroom. Slowly, over the course of a few hours, Naruto grew hopeful. And then he began planning. He drafted several dozen ideas and scrapped them after the monster pointed out one obvious flaw or another, but he refused to grow discouraged. He just kept thinking.

Because Naruto didn't understand seals, but he knew how they felt. Like the current of a river or the pressure of a breeze or the instinct to move.

And he felt a current, just a glimmer of it, just a smudge, in the second he slammed into that haughty kid.

So even if it was a wild goose-chase, even if it turned into nothing, Naruto had to try. He had to get his hands on something concrete. And if that meant dancing around the hokage and Iruka. . . he would just need to be sneaky about it.

With his plan finalized, and his courage gathered, Naruto put on his biggest grin and took the first step with a confidence he didn't feel:

"So you don't really talk to anyone, huh?"


	5. Chapter 5

Thank you to everyone who was kind last chapter, and even everyone who was not. I should make some notes: I take criticism only in the form of ritualistic combat. Unless it is said with a blade, I dont really care. To those who weren't really on board with my flashbacks in the last two chapters, but who managed to communicate that with basic respect; I totally get that. It was some fun experimentation, but it's not showing up again for some time. Not because of any feedback, but because I have most of it already written.

Finally. . . this has basically no plot. It wont have one for quite some time. Its just a big angsty mess and exactly what the summary promises. No OP stuff, no bamf naruto, just a lot of trying to figure out how to navigate untreated adhd and social isolation. If that's not interesting to you personally, that is very tragic, please don't let the door hit you on the way out.

* * *

Naruto sometimes wished he could drown the monster. He wanted to walk into the cage and skin the mutt alive. He wanted to eat its heart raw.

"I remember my previous container," it said, and the hate it exuded felt powerful enough to drown in. "I know shinobi. You will be used until broken. Just as you used a poor, desperate creature."

Naruto felt his anger, the heat under his skin and the sour hate in his stomach, wilt away. Suddenly, he was metal-cold. The world felt unbearably sharp. Water dripped from the ceiling, loud as a bell. Naruto couldn't feel his face. His mouth was an alien, dull thing. His tongue felt no different from a hunk of raw meat.

Somehow, though, when he spoke, his words came out crystal clear. As defined as an ink stain on paper. As intense as a pang of dull-mirror betrayal.

Quiet.

"You had someone before me?"

Naruto steps forward, and murky water tugs at his clothing.

The monster grins.

"Wouldn't you like to know?"

He doesn't recall what happened after that. For the life of him, he can't get a glimpse at that missing conversation. He remembered the rush of blood to his head, the roar of anger that blurred his vision to everything except the scarlet flash of the monster's slit iris. He remembered the impression of heat washing over his face. Like a vat of steam wafting over him. Like a sunburn sinking into his skin.

All Naruto knew was that when he snapped back to awareness, he was inside the monsters cage. On the wrong side of the bars.

He's inside the demon's cage, and the monster is restrained with sharp, wicked chains that bind and bite into its fur. The metal glows slightly, and Naruto sees more than he ever had-the outline of large ears, the impression of more limbs fanning out in the dark, the distinctly canine set to the monster's muzzle. The clawed, humanoid paws.

Naruto was on the wrong side of the cage, and he was safe. Somehow.

The chakra in the air was uniquely powerful-salty and twisted and clean.

And before he can walk any further, Naruto fell though the water coating the floor and gasped back to awareness in his empty, hollow apartment.

He didn't visit the fox again for a few days. When he did, Naruto refused to speak until he could summon those same rushing chains on command. He By the time he succeeded, the monster was entirely uncooperative.

That was fine. Naruto had his whole life to figure this out.

* * *

Surprisingly, the least annoying thing about being pushed into the seat furthest away from Hinata was that Naruto's newest neighbor was Sasuke. Previously, the extended contact would have made him see red. Now, he had a distinct appreciation for how rarely Sasuke bothered to speak.

The most annoying thing would be that other people seemed to envy his position. The girls in his class were distinctly upset that Naruto had an institutionalized monopoly on Sasuke's left side. He told them it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. They rolled their eyes.

Naruto scoffed at the thought that the bastard could somehow be such prime real-estate, but he didn't bother to refute it any further. He didn't bother with a lot of things lately. Talking needlessly left a poor taste in his mouth. When he started befriending Hinata, he had slowly left behind the impulse to fill the silence. Now, he found it hard to stomach empty conversation with people who didn't really want to talk to him.

If he wanted to rant, he had a captive audience of one. That's all he needed most days.

Still, there was the errant impulse here and there to start screaming when the bastard answered a question Naruto failed, or when he snorted quietly at some joke in his head. Naruto swallowed down the urge, if only because he was tired of being the one yelling and yelling at people who didn't care.

Which was why he doesn't protest when Iruka asks him to stay behind after class. Naruto prepared himself to ignore some lecture or another. Iruka had a few obvious buttons, and one of them was being ignored. It invariably made him lose his cool.

Instead of a lecture, though, Iruka squinted at Naruto and then nodded to himself.

"Let's go to Ichiraku," he said.

Naruto blinked. He bluntly said, "I'm not interested," before moving to collect his bag.

"You can think of it as bullying me out of my hard-earned paycheck." Iruka's eyes narrowed and he raised two fingers. "I'll get you two specials! With extra pork!"

Naruto twitched, his will power and pride rapidly wising up to the insane mental force which was Instant Gratification. His expression scrunched up into something supremely grumpy. "Three or I walk."

"Deal."

"And I want-"

"Don't push it."

Naruto couldn't help but release a startled laugh, especially when Iruka had on his fake-stern expression. Iruka dropped his business persona and he chuckled. "But you can have my share of beansprouts as well."

The open fondness in that sentence nearly soured his appetite.

On the walk to the shop, they didn't really talk. Naruto mentioned that the clouds, massive and puffy over the eastern horizon, looked kinda like a bunch of dogs. Iruka looked at the same formation and saw a giant lion. "See? It's spitting a fire jutsu?"

It was. . . disorienting. He was still angry with Iruka. He knew it. He had been angry that day, and the day before, yet now he couldn't really get a proper grip on the feeling. It would come, sure. Naruto was never at a loss for anger. But it felt clumsy. Big and empty, like a giant box he couldn't properly hold as he strolled through the quiet streets of southern Konoha.

It annoyed him. Even as he sat down for ramen, something that should spark an explosion of joy, he just felt mutedly upset. Unwilling to forgive, and unable to be properly outraged. Naruto stared at the halved hard-boiled egg artistically nestled among slices of pork and bok-choy. He pursed his lips and poked at the vivid yolk.

Next to him, Iruka sighed, and he quit jabbering on about some story concerning him and Mizuki back when they were genin. "Look. . . I know you're upset. I'm not happy either."

Naruto shrugged. The tip of his chopstick dug into the doughy yolk, gouging out chunks and scattering them over the surface of the bowl.

"Hinata was a good influence on you," Iruka started, and Naruto felt a flash of annoyance-of course Iruka only cared because he wasn't as docile, it figured- "And you were a great friend for her."

That threw him for a loop. "Ehh?!"

Iruka rolled his eyes. "Yes, you. She had a lot more confidence. She was noticeably happier."

Naruto gritted his jaw, feeling his stomach twist with hurt. "Then why won't she talk to me?"

"I. . ." Iruka stopped and elbowed him. "Eat your food before it gets cold. I'm not paying for lukewarm ramen."

Naruto obediently began chewing on noodles, and once he did, Iruka said, "Hinata got in a great deal of trouble for, uh, 'stealing' family secrets. Her clan is very powerful." Iruka scratched at his temple. "Powerful enough to level a serious accusation towards you. And even if the clan head withdrew his suspicions, that doesn't mean he was happy, nor that he absolved you of blame for the situation."

"So her dad threw a fit?"

"Hah," Iruka laughed dully and said, "That's a way to put it. . . Yes, he asked Hinata's teachers to keep you separate."

Naruto jabbed at his noodles; his expression twisted up in frustration. "That's not fair!" He whipped around to face Iruka. "Can't you tell him to go to hell?!"

"No." Iruka's eyebrows had that little furrow between them, but instead of the deep thought that usually accompanied his expression, he just looked sad. "I'm a chunin, he's a clan head, and my direct superiors agreed to his request."

Naruto stared at Iruka for a split second before a wave of anger washed up over his shoulders. He clenched a fist around his chopsticks and ducked his head just so he wouldn't have to look at that dumb fucking expression on his teacher's face. Iruka thought Naruto was just fine with Hinata, and that made the idea that he only went along with this bullshit because someone told him to made Naruto angry enough to spit. Iruka didn't have the guts to stick up for either of them. It wasn't apathy or a different opinion or even a simple case of ignorance. He thought one thing and did another. He was wrong, and he knew it, and that wasn't enough. He was-He was such a goddamn-

"Coward."

Naruto flinched. Iruka was picking at his food, making a single fishcake spin round and round. "'Coward,'" he repeated factually. "That's probably what you're thinking. And it's true. It was cowardly of me to not support you, and it is cowardly for me to abide by a rule which I believe wrong."

Naruto stared at his teacher. His hunched-shoulders, sad-eyed, trust-betraying teacher. "Then. . . why?"

"Because the cowardly thing, in this scenario, also happens to be the smartest." Iruka pinned him with an intense expression. This was a lecture, and it had Naruto's full and undivided attention. "Had I defended you at first chance, the Hyuuga would have argued bias and requested another instructor to be present during the hearing. If I had defended you, I wouldn't have been in the room. I wouldn't have been able to testify on your behalf when you truly needed it."

Naruto recalled the flicker of hope he had upon seeing two familiar faces. It made the guilt he had felt upon raking Iruka over the coals resurge in a spike of nausea.

"Thankfully, you didn't need my help, so I didn't have to reveal anything." He sounded so professional. Like Naruto hadn't used him as a big part of his emotional appeal. "And, if I were to not follow the orders of my superior, I would be relieved of my duties. Hinata would no longer have a teacher who finds her growth more important than her father's wishes. And you would no longer have me." Iruka sighed, and his shoulders slumped. "Naruto. . . I'm sorry."

Naruto didn't know what he was feeling anymore.

"It was my duty to report on my class. I would do it again. But you have a right to be angry, especially since I didn't take the time to explain anything. There was so much happening that week, and you slipped through the cracks."

"Can. . ." Naruto licked his lips. The broth must have dried out his mouth. "I still have some questions."

Iruka nodded. "And I will answer what I can."

Naruto asked about the limitations placed on genin, and Iruka explained the historical precedents and deaths that made that rule necessary. It made Naruto grit his jaw. "So they had students copying the arrays. And getting hurt."

"It's not our proudest history," Iruka said. "Sealing is complicated, even if it looks simple at first glance. The practice came from senior shinobi not understanding the process, and we paid for it. Even knowing the risks, it was still a popular idea."

"That's screwed up," Naruto stated.

"Regulations," Iruka said, "are written in blood. It is a rule in place for student safety."

Naruto narrowed his eyes. "But what makes it less dangerous for genin?"

"Teachers. Sealing is usually taught via apprenticeship or tutorial." Iruka ordered another bowl of ramen for Naruto, as promised. "And a number of things. More mature chakra control, more diligence."

"But what about theoretical stuff? Just books about it?"

Iruka nodded. "That is the double-edged sword. The theory in developing seals, or even how they work, is a shinobi secret. It was fine for anyone to copy simple seals, because it takes an impossible amount of dedication to reverse-engineer them. But actual theory is heavily guarded among the elemental nations."

"So too dangerous to copy," Naruto summarized, "and too secret to learn."

"There's a third problem," Iruka seemed regretful to admit. "Not many are skilled at sealing. So beyond basic techniques that are necessary in some jobs, it's very difficult to find more advanced examples of what the art itself is capable of."

So. . . there was never a chance in hell for it to work.

Naruto huffs and props his chin up with his free hand. He shoves a slice of pork in his mouth. "That sucks. I have a lot of chakra. I just thought. . . I dunno, that it could be something I could do."

"There's plenty that you can do," Iruka argues. He reaches up to ruffle Naruto's hair a bit aggressively. "If you put your mind to it! Don't go off and stop paying attention and then expect to be great on the first try."

Naruto yelps and jerks away, shooting his teacher a stink-eye. He ignores how warm his face is. "It's not. . ." He didn't want to slack off. Sitting still was harder than anything in Naruto's opinion. But Iruka didn't get that, and no one else seemed to feel the same, so Naruto shrugged. "I don't expect that."

"Well if you're going to be Hokage, you need to act like it."

"Eh?" Naruto hadn't talked about his dream since Hinata had asked him. It hadn't seemed so pressing. But now he wondered how he could forget about his ambitions when he once could never shut up about them. "Do you actually believe in me," Naruto asked, "or is this some inverted psychology thing?"

"Reverse psychology," Iruka corrected. "And of course I believe in you. It's a matter of applying yourself, Naruto."

Naruto frowned. "But do you actually think I would do a good job? Because-" Well. Naruto is starting to doubt it. He wanted respect and admiration, and the monster seemed to love endlessly reminding him how out of reach that was. And it was. He was bottom of the class. He used to just ignore that fact. Now it seemed so insurmountable.

"You have an intense sense of justice," Iruka said suddenly. "You want things to be fair, and you want things to be kind. And that's what would make you a good Hokage. A good person. But our ability to do unhindered good is proportional to our power-And in comparison to the will of the Hyuuga, I'm weak." Iruka forced a smile and ruffled Naruto's hair again. This time, Naruto didn't move away. "So get strong, alright? Then you can stand up to things that I can't."

Naruto was so overwhelmed he dropped into the sewer just so he could breathe. He slapped at his cheeks, pacing aimlessly.

"So-"

"Don't even start."

The monster laughed, but it shut up.

Naruto took the time he needed so he wouldn't start sobbing like some kinda crybaby. He mastered his emotions, steeling himself into someone who had the guts to be what Iruka-sensei imagined. He was gonna be Hokage, damnit! People would look at him, and they would be forced to recognize him. He might have some rough patches, but that won't make him quit! He tramped down on everything until his eyes were dry and his hands were steady. He was a ninja.

And yet, somehow, when he blinked his eyes open and saw Iruka's completely sincere smile, Naruto lost all composure. He lunged forward in a vicious hug and dug his nails into the padding of Iruka's chunin vest and warbled, "What the hell is that kinda talk, dattebayo?! Don't make me cry over ramen, you bastard!"

Iruka took the snot fest like only a teacher for ten-year-olds can.

Naruto got back to his apartment. He splashed water on his face and drank a few gulps directly from the kitchen tap. Then, with a cursory check to make sure no one was obviously standing in some corner of the room or that the hokage was serenely having some tea at the kitchen table, Naruto reached into the cupboard under the sink and withdrew an old coffee ground canister. The piece of painter's tape that labeled the can itching powder was peeling at the edges.

Naruto took it to his table (making a note for the third time that week that he needed to glue one of legs back into place), and he unceremoniously laid out the contents on the table: a dozen painstakingly copied water storage seals. He shifted through the curled loose-leaf paper and found the one he had worked with most recently.

"So," he mumbled to himself, "it is good to know that things blowing up is kinda normal."

Mostly normal. Not a good sign, but an expected one. Really, that was a weight off his shoulders, Naruto thought as he painstakingly altered a few select symbols on his latest copy. When he completed his alterations and ran his chakra though the array, it became immediately obvious that he broke something. The current of chakra slammed into a blockade, and Naruto aborted the technique before anything could catch on fire.

Naruto grimaced and grabbed his notes to jot down a few new ideas.

An insane amount of dedication, huh? That sounded about right.


	6. Chapter 6

Hello! Thanks for your patience and everything! There are a few things that go on in this chapter, but the first is that we see some of the conversations that Naruto and Hinata had. Since there is not strikethrough option for ff, please just imagine any sentence fragments from Hinata as crossed out. Special thanks to everyone who has recommended my fic to the r/narutofanfiction!

* * *

You_ seem tired._

**My neighbors had another screaming match. Loud.**

_What do they fight about?_

**Living in a hellhole. Having kids. The two are related. I wish they would just move out already.**

_My condolences._

**?**

_Sorry, but without guilt._

**don't worry. does it get loud having a family all live in one place?**

_The compound has a decorum of silence imposed at night. It is supposed to promote contemplation. And act as a security measure._

**that sounds boring.**

_It is unav_

_It gets lonely._

* * *

Naruto tilted his head and brought the scroll closer to his nose. The scent of old paper tickled his nose.

When he and Hinata first started talking, he would approach their written conversations like homework because he understood them to about the same degree. And then, even when he could get the gist without trouble, he read them just to fill his hours at home. And then because he could hold the pages to his chest and gently hug them when it felt like he might otherwise drip away and become a stain on the floor in his empty apartment.

Now, he read them mostly because they hurt. Like picking at the indents on his cheeks or talking to the monster.

"What were you going to say?" he muttered, squinting at the crossed-out words. Hinata crossed out a lot of her words at first, but she had slowly dropped the habit. This single phrase, from such a short time before everything went to shit, was odd. Sighing, he picked himself off the floor and tore apart his apartment to find his pocket dictionary. It took a few swears, but he found the right radicals for the incomplete kanji.

Unavoidable.

Naruto frowned and brought his scroll to the kitchen table. Hinata talked about things without ever really talking about them. She had gotten better about it, but she still said the most when she said very little.

Unavoidable. She couldn't change it. It was something she hated, but couldn't off-set. Why not just finish her sentence? Why cross it out?

And then Naruto realized that he would have challenged her on it. He would have said that she could make noise. She could cause mayhem. She could force people to change just by being loud and obnoxious enough.

He wouldn't have understood. Having no one meant he never faced consequences. Not ones he cared about. He could choose his hurts.

Hinata just wanted to minimize hers.

Unavoidable.

She wanted to change. She wouldn't. And therefore it didn't bear talking about.

Biting at his lip, Naruto considered the upcoming graduation exam. It was almost a month away. He qualified for this one. He had put in the work and brought up his grades and trudged through the academy with his head down. Some days, he forgot that he had ever made a friend.

Naruto rubs at his cheek.

The students in the year above him were cramming for graduation. Naruto didn't get the same lessons. He didn't have to go on the survival outings that the graduating class had in place.

Hinata's cousin did.

* * *

**they give orphans last names sometimes. even if theres no parent. if you dont have a last name its a clear sign that you come from nowhere. then no one wants anything to do with you**

_You don't think Uzumaki means anything?_

**i will make it mean something. but i don't think its a parental name. there's one uzumaki on the memorial stone, but she's the only one. i think they gave me her name because there was no one else who had it.**

_How did you find her name?_

**The old man. he pointed it out one day. said that I should bring honor to it by being a good ninja.**

_I am often told the same. I think it is a Kohona custom they teach to ninja. If you live to a certain age, you are obligated to repeat it._

**gross. I would probably just tell people to bring dishonor to their names. just to keep life interesting, ya know?**

_I think names are often __ What if she is related to you?_

**the old man could have said so. he didn't.**

_He could have been understating the matter. Or being subtle for whatever reason._

**I never met her. She's never met me. Just sharing a name means nothing.**

_But do you want it to mean something?_

**not really.**

* * *

"Come on," Naruto groaned. "Be mean. Say anything."

The monster gave no indication it noticed. Naruto kept nagging for its attention, but it resolutely ignored him and offered no distraction to his big plan.

"You'll get bored eventually," Naruto challenged.

The bait went untouched, and Naruto grimaced before he blinked out of the sewer. He fiddled with his old kunai holster. He had used it to carry around his scroll and brushes, and it felt lopsided to wear it again. "Quit stalling," he whispered to himself. With one final sigh, he wandered through the courtyard. Like he predicted, Hinata was back in her old spot now that she didn't have to deal with her cousin.

Naruto tossed his scroll in front of her. She tensed, looking up with wide, dull-mirror eyes.

Her hair was shorter. She had a new jacket.

"Hey," Naruto greeted cheerfully. He gave his brightest grin, baring his teeth and squeezing his eyes shut. "It's been boring, ya know?"

. . .

"I missed you," He tried again. "How have you been?"

Without a word, Hinata ducked her head and swayed to her feet.

She walked away.

Naruto took an aborted step after her. "That's it? It can't even be a secret anymore? I never wanted to get you in trouble. I'm sorry."

His scroll laid on the ground, covered in dust. He shouldn't have minded. He threw it there himself.

"I'm your only friend and you can't even look at me."

Hinata didn't pause as she walked away.

Naruto gritted his jaw. His nails bit into his palms, and he wasn't really talking to Hinata. The heat spilling out of his mouth is something he learned in the sewer. "Fine. I don't give a shit." He turns away from Hinata's retreating back, he drawls, "Next time you want to help, maybe don't be so useless that you do more harm than good."

* * *

He left his scroll in the dirt.

_Why can't people be kind?_

**Because other people suck.**

_Girls tease Sakura about everything. Her looks or her intelligence or the way she speaks. Because it isn't physical violence, there's nothing to be done. I hate that. It just only breeds more cruelty._

**Sakura rubs it in their noses. She likes being the smartest.**

_You don't get it. It's hateful._

**_I'm not saying she deserves it. She just invites it._**

_It makes a whole environment where no one feels safe._

**it must be nice to feel safe. it must be nice for that to ever be an option.**

_You are being_

_Why are you _

_ Do you always feel this way?_

**what way?**

_Resentful._

**No. It's new. I don't like it either.**

* * *

He didn't apologize.

* * *

"You feel shame," the monster noted. Its grin was razor-slick. "Isn't that quite unusual?"

Naruto blinked. The pipes dripped and hissed. Murky water sloshed around his calves. He swung his arm out in an arc and chains reared up from the water. They slammed into flesh and fur in a whirlwind of metal and iron. They bit into the monster like a pack of wild dogs.

Naruto didn't have any control. It was nice that something defended him.

The monster screeched in pain and outrage. The pit in Naruto's stomach shrunk. He no longer wanted to gut himself over being unwanted.

"Everyone can tell that you're here," Naruto said as he stalked forward to the bars of the cage. "That's why they hate me." He scales the bars to poke and prod at the seal.

He didn't really believe his words. It just felt good to say.

* * *

Moving through the aisles of the grocery, Naruto debated the merits of buying vegetables. Iruka kept mentioning their nigh religious importance. The mythical 'nutrients' might help him graduate. However, soft things usually rotted before Naruto remembered they existed.

"Do you know how to cook?"

The monster remained motionless. It hadn't bothered to speak for two weeks.

"Yeah," Naruto said dully. "Me either." He picks out a pepper at random, and then a radish, and then some bamboo shoots. He didn't entirely know how they would fit together, but he would make something edible. He could just douse it with ramen seasoning and call it a day if he got desperate.

He ambled to the counter, arms piled high with ramen and milk and random vegetables. The line had grown since he wandered in. In front of him, an elderly woman tapped her foot impatiently. Curiously, Naruto leaned around her, precariously balancing on one foot and craning his head.

The customer at the counter was desperately patting at her pockets. "I just had it," she mumbled to herself. She had quite a few groceries piled into cloth bags. One of the straps had been replaced with braided rope and sewn into the fabric. "It must have fallen," she said. "I had it."

"We're about to close," the shopkeeper said.

"Can't I just check again? I know I walked in here with it."

"We're about to close."

Naruto's own wallet had grown very plump over the past few weeks. He hadn't been in the mood for pranks. Grocery hauls that big were a full-day production, but he had enough to cover some of it. Plus, she looked incredibly stressed. Losing money was one thing, but it always compounded into something bigger.

Naruto reshuffled the food in his arms and grabbed Gama-chan. "Hey, miss, I got it."

The relief on her face flickered to life and died in the span of a second. Her eyes widened in recognition, and she leaned back. Like he was contagious. Like he would bite her. "Ah," She stuttered, "No. That's alright. I'll-I'll figure it out. Thank you."

"I have money."

"No," she repeated, already turning back to the counter with a stiffness in her shoulders. "Thank you, but I have it handled."

She didn't have it handled. Naruto wasn't made of money, but he knew how much of a pain going home without food could be. He often lost track of time and ended up getting takeout on nights where he was supposed to cook. He just wanted to help.

He wanted to help. And everyone wanted to pretend he didn't exist.

Naruto sneered, annoyance flaring up. "You're holding up the line," He said, staring her down as she collected her empty bags. Her eyes were very brown. "I was paying for the privilege of leaving before Mr. Shopkeeper withers up and dies."

Mr. Shopkeeper glared at him for the disrespect, and the customer blanched, and Naruto whirled away to step back into line, his nose in the air. He ignored the rest of the conversation. He dropped into the sewer and waits out every dirty look and the detached way that people avoid acknowledging he exists.

He blinked, and the store was nearly empty, and he didn't feel like paying anything to anyone. But he did. He went home and sliced a pepper into his ramen. It tasted fine.

"No one wants to say it," He told the monster. He sat cross legged in the water. "They all know. But kids don't. When I henge, no one can tell. There's nothing weird about my chakra. But they all know."

Naruto looks at his hands and tries to see some difference in them. Are his nails too sharp? His veins too green? "How do they know?"

The monster didn't answer. It didn't even shift.

So he did something stupid. He wrote everything down. He listed out every possible reason, every detail, every slight. He held the pain each moment brought close to his chest; not to exploit it, but to grow detached to it. To grow immune to the pangs it set off in his chest.

And with it all written down, it hurt how obvious it was.

The sewer in his mind was dim. Green shadows and amber lights. The outline of the monster's muzzle nearly blended into the background, but Naruto trudged forward though the water for a closer look. He had always thought it looked canine. The paws were more human than animal. The same opposable thumbs. He couldn't tell how many tails laid hidden in the depths of the sewer.

"What are you?"

The monster in the cage cracked open a single red eye and stared down at him. "You already know."

Naruto crossed his arms over his stomach and looped his hands into the fabric of his pants. "Why are you inside me?"

"Because you were born to bear my hatred."

* * *

AN: For some reason, theres no strikethrough option for FF which sucks.


End file.
